Paddymania Returns to America (and Poland)

Kathleen Cioffi provides an overview of the ambitious Paderewski Musical Project, examining the collision of American and Polish dramaturgies across three pieces—3 Paderewskis, Virtuoso, and Memory Laws. All three were part of a 2017 competition encouraging American writers to propose a musical celebrating Poland’s hundred-year anniversary of independence by valorizing Jan Paderewski. Cioffi concludes that the nationalistic impulses of the right-wing government are shielded by their choice of American artists for a state-sponsored project, and of Paderewski, household name and national hero, as the subject.