Maria Szymanowska

Maria Szymanowska
Maria Szymanowska around 1830
Background information
Birth name	Marianna Agata Wołowska
Genres	Classical music
Occupation(s)	Pianist, composer
Instruments	Piano

Maria Szymanowska (Polish pronunciation: [ˈmarja ʂɨmaˈnɔfska]; born Marianna Agata Wołowska; Warsaw, December 14, 1789 – July 25, 1831, St. Petersburg, Russia) was a Polish composer and one of the first professional virtuoso pianists of the 19th century. She toured extensively throughout Europe, especially in the 1820s, before settling permanently in St. Petersburg. In the Russian imperial capital, she composed for the court, gave concerts, taught music, and ran an influential salon.

Her compositions—largely piano pieces, songs, and other small chamber works, as well as the first piano concert etudes and nocturnes in Poland—typify the stile brillant of the era preceding Chopin. She was the mother of Celina Szymanowska, who married the Polish Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz.

Marianna Agata Wołowska was born in Warsaw, Poland on December 14, 1789 into a prosperous Polish family. Her father Franciszek Wołowski was a landlord and a brewer. Her mother Barbara Wołowska (née Lanckorońska) came from a noble Polish Lanckoroński family. The history of her early years and especially her musical studies is uncertain; she appears to have studied piano with Antoni Lisowski and Tomasz Gremm, and composition with Franciszek Lessel, Józef Elsner and Karol Kurpiński. She gave her first public recitals in Warsaw and Paris in 1810.

In the same year, she married Józef Szymanowski, with whom she had three children while living in Poland: Helena (1811–61), who married a man named Malewski, and twins Celina (1812–55), who married Adam Mickiewicz, and Romuald (1812–40), who became an engineer). The children remained with Maria after her separation from Szymanowski in 1820. The marriage ended in divorce. Józef Szymanowski died in 1832.