Tadeusz Baird

In 1944 at the age of 16 he was deported to Germany as a forced labourer, and after a failed escape attempt was imprisoned in a concentration camp.

[1] Between 1947 and 1951 Baird studied composition and musicology in Warsaw under Piotr Rytek and Kazimierz Sikorski, and piano with Tadeusz Wituski.

The aim of Group 49 was to write communicative and expressive music according to socialist realism, the dominant ideology in the Eastern Bloc at the time.

[4] He wrote both large-scale symphonies and chamber music; however, of great importance in his output are numerous vocal cycles inspired by poetry.

[5] But the later works, starting with the 1966 one-act opera Jutro ("tomorrow", based on the short story by Joseph Conrad)[6] become darker, particularly in the orchestral piece Psychodrama (1972) and in his final work, the song cycle for baritone and orchestra Głosy z oddali (‘Voices from afar’), which sets a bleak text by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz on the subject of death and personal extinction.