Kazimierz Tarczyński - a piano-maker and amateur historian (1802-1873)

Abstract

The Tarczyński family, connected with Mazovia (Warsaw and Płock) but also with the towns of Łowicz and Łęczyca, played an important role in the cultural life of the Kingdom of Poland in the 19th c. The life and works of the sons of Kazimierz Tarczyński have been described in many publications, but he himself is mostly known as a piano-maker. This article explores his historical interests, especially on his campanology research, which is hardly known, on the basis of family records and documents surviving in the State Archives in Łowicz and Płock. Kazimierz Tarczyński, son of Kacper and Franciszka nee Markowska, was born in 1802 in
Uniejów in an impoverished gentry family. He was educated in Uniejów; he was a good Latin philologist and, thanks to the canon of the Uniejów collegiate church A. Durski, he also learnt music. In 1825 in Warsaw he was certifi ed as a qualifi ed piano-maker. He worked, among other places, in J. Długosz’s factory, helping in the construction of the eolipantalion, an instrument which combined the sound effects of the piano and the organ, and interested the young Frederic Chopin. When visiting Dlugosz’s factory, Chopin got acquainted with Kazimierz Tarczyński and even presented him with two pieces composed for the eolipantation, which,
unfortunately, have not survived. In 1827–1857 Tarczyński had his own piano factory in Łęczyca and Płock; he produced 70-80 instruments, which were highly valued by specialists. After a bankruptcy he only repaired
and tuned pianos, having a large family to support. He had seven children with Marianna Grodzicka (d.1836) and eleven with Agnieszka Wachulska (some of his eighteen children died very young). As he travelled for business around the Kingdom of Poland, he had many opportunities to pursue his interest in “the history of the fatherland”, inspired by the ideas of the Płock Scientifi c Society. He had a large and valuable collection of medals and coins (reaching 1800 items in 1871), part of which was used by Ignacy Zagórski in his study Monety dawnej Polski [Old Polish Coins], published in 1845. Tarczyński also collected data for a study entitled “Historya dzwonów w Polsce” [The history of bells in Poland], which he intended to publish; unfortunately his sudden death in 1873 hindered the project, which was almost fi nished. The manuscript was known to several
researcher, e.g. Rev. Ignacy Polkowski, who delivered a lecture on the subject in the Academy of Learning in Cracow in 1880. A year earlier the work was reviewed by Rev. Antoni Brykczyński (in Korespondent Płocki). The manuscript, completed by Kazimierz Tarczyński’s sons c. 1880, was sent to the Academy of Learning, where it got lost; the Academy archives were searched for it — in vain — in 1903 by Władysław Tarczyński and in 2014 by the author of the present article. Tarczyński’s lost work can be partly investigated on the basis of his notes surviving in the Museum in Łowicz (signature 77 MŁ) and the aforementioned review by Brykczyński. According to the latter text, the manuscript described 53 bells from the Płock, Warsaw and Włocławek dioceses and if it was published it would become an important study in “our country’s archaeology”. Tarczyński’s notes, on 90 pages, which his son Władysław qualifi ed as “remnants”, include
26 charts with inscriptions and drawings, 27 pages with working descriptions of bells from various places, 17 lists of bells grouped according to a) the kind of inscription (e.g. Soli deo gloria), b) the place, c) the chronology. His working classifi cations can certainly be useful to contemporary campanologists.