The Complete Works vol. 70: The Songs of the Polish People. The supplement to volume 1. Collected from the manuscripts and printed sources and edited by A. Skrukwa. Musicological editing by M. Prochaska. Poznań 2003, pp. LXII+206, illustrations.
Published under the scientific auspices of the Polish Academy of Sciences financed by the State Committee for Scientific Research.
This is the first volume of the series of supplements containing complementary material and comments to the regional monographs published as CWOK using photo-offset technique (volumes 1-34 of CWOK). They are identical with the first 19th century edition of 'Lud' [The People]. For this reason this volume contains a spacious introduction to the series of supplements (volumes 70-84 of CWOK). It discusses the principles of supplements' edition (a choice of the material, its classification and a scope of editorial work) and principles of creating comments to those monographs. The comments are crucial for a contemporary reader, because of the unique 19th century editorial methods (partial references to source texts, a frequent lack of quotes’ localization and a lack of additional references such as bibliographical lists, indexes etc.) The comments concern both the manuscripts retained in the Kolberg’s archive and other collections, as well as the relevant literature used by Kolberg in the form of citations, excerpts and notes. The comments include the information about their authors, chronology and differences between the sense of the original text and the published text, which are relevant for interpretation. Moreover, the volume discusses the scope and the way of editing of additional bibliographical lists and indexes, which encompass the whole material related to a particular region, i. e. material from a monograph and a supplement volume.
The main content of volume 70 consists of the commentaries to ‘The Songs of the Polish People’ published by Kolberg in 1857, and later, as re-edition, as volume 1 of ‘The Complete Works’. The introduction discusses the Kolberg’s work on this collection of ballads and dances, the condition of remained sources and the scope of commentaries. The commentaries include information about the person who collected the melody and text, the date of its documentation (if possible), as well as bibliographical references provided in accordance with contemporary standards. The commentaries are relevant if Kolberg provided the reference to variants or previously published sources and informed about the possible differences in bibliographical information, text or notation. The commentaries to ballads include also references to ‘Katalog polskiej ballady ludowej’ [The catalogue of the Polish folk ballads] by E. Jaworska and a list of each variant of ballad theme from ‘The Songs of the Polish People’ that appears in all regional monographs.
The supplement to ‘The Songs of the Polish People’ does not include additional text from manuscripts because all ballads from Kolbergs archive are already published in respective regional monographs or will appear in supplements to those monographs. Unpublished records of dance melodies were catalogized in the same way, i. e. the information about the region of origin is superior over the genre of material. This volume possesses indexes encompassing the content of volume 1 and 70.
‘The Songs of the Polish People’ is a significant link connecting monographs with supplements. It introduces the supplementary part and posseses indispensable information allowing a contemporary reader to orientate in the collection of ballads, firstly published in 1857.
