Eta Tyrmand

Eta, or Edi, Tyrmand, born on 23 February 1917 in Warsaw, was a composer, pianist, and music educator and is regarded as one of the formative figures of twentieth-century Belarusian musical culture. In her Soviet passport, her name was entered as Eta Moisejewna Tyrmand (Эта Моисеевна Тырманд) — “Eta” being a Yiddish diminutive of Esther. Unofficially, however, she was usually called Edi or Eddi; this name also appeared in printed editions of her compositions in the post-Soviet period.

Her life trajectory was closely intertwined with the political upheavals of her time. In particular, the experiences of persecution and flight during the Holocaust, as well as the formative influence of her Jewish heritage, profoundly shaped both her biography and her artistic work.

Tyrmand grew up in an educated, culturally refined Jewish family with strong musical traditions and received her first piano lessons at the age of four. As a young girl, she studied with Henryk Melcer-Szczawiński (1869–1928), an outstanding pianist and composer, a pupil of Theodor Leschetizky and later director of the Warsaw Conservatory. At the age of twelve, Tyrmand passed the demanding entrance examination for the piano department of the Warsaw Conservatory (today the Fryderyk Chopin University of Music). There she received piano instruction from renowned pedagogues such as Paweł Lewicki and Marcelina Kimontt-Jacyna, who represented both the Polish and the Russian piano traditions. In addition, she studied music theory and polyphony with Witold Maliszewski (1873–1939), founder and first director of the Odessa Conservatory and a pupil of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.

In 1935, alongside her piano studies, Tyrmand enrolled in an additional program in the conservatory’s music pedagogy department, specializing in choral conducting under the composer and choral conductor Stanisław Kazuro (1881–1961).

In addition to her formal training at the conservatory, Tyrmand’s musical sensibility was profoundly shaped by the rich Jewish cultural life of Warsaw. The synagogue music of the Orthodox Great Synagogue and of the reform-oriented Nożyk Synagogue, where her uncles sang in the choir, left a lasting impression on her. Already at a young age she distinguished herself as a skilled improviser, for example by temporarily substituting for the synagogue organist or by accompanying the renowned cantor Moshe Koussevitzky.

In 1930s Poland, she was increasingly exposed to antisemitic hostility, which manifested itself, among other ways, in social exclusion by fellow students. At that time, Jewish life in Warsaw was marked by growing social segregation: separate schools, distinct leisure activities, and a largely inward-oriented communal life formed a kind of internal ghetto—long before the official establishment of the ghetto by the German occupiers. In a later interview, Tyrmand said of this period: “At that time, I was a true Zionist; I lived in a genuinely Jewish environment … Jewish music was deeply rooted within me.” While still a student, she worked as a piano accompanist for Jewish artists, including the folk singer Lola Folman and the dancer Ruth Abramowitsch. This activity had a lasting impact on her later compositional work, particularly with regard to the rhythmic design of her pieces and the central role of improvisatory elements.

In 1938 she composed her first original works: two songs for her final examination in vocal studies. One of them was taken into the repertoire of the well-known Polish popular singer Mieczysław Fogg (1901–1990)—a major success for the aspiring composer.

The outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939 marked an abrupt rupture in Edi Tyrmand’s life. She was part of a group of students from the Warsaw Conservatory who, at the time of the German invasion of Poland, were attending a summer camp in the eastern part of the country. News of the air raids on Warsaw, the fires, and the advance of German troops made a return to the capital impossible. Relatives who could still be reached by telephone urgently warned against coming back. Several young musicians, among them Tyrmand and her friends, the composers Genrikh Wagner (1922–2000) and Lew Abeliowitsch (1912–1985), decided to flee eastward. The exact route taken by the refugees is unknown; it is only certain that they eventually arrived in the city of Białystok. The region around Białystok was initially occupied by German troops but was transferred on 22 September 1939 to Soviet forces in accordance with the secret provisions of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. Together with other formerly eastern Polish territories, it was incorporated into the Belarusian Soviet Republic.

By October 1939, Tyrmand and her friends were already in Minsk, where they were promptly given the opportunity to continue their studies at the local conservatory. In addition to Tyrmand, Wagner, and Abeliowitsch, the group of Polish-Jewish refugees also included Mieczysław Weinberg (1919–1996), who would later become one of the most significant composers of Soviet modernism. Edi Tyrmand was admitted directly to the second year of the piano program, entering the class of the respected pianist and composer Alexei Klumov (1907–1944), a pupil of the legendary piano pedagogue Heinrich Neuhaus at the Moscow Conservatory. Klumov was also known as a composer for his contributions to Belarusian piano music.

The migration to Belarus marked a biographical turning point, which Tyrmand later described as a “second birth.” With her arrival in Minsk, not only did a new phase of her musical training begin, but also a profound social and emotional reorientation. There she encountered a supportive and open environment in which she felt accepted both as a musician and as a person. “I felt deep gratitude toward the country that had taken me in,” she later recalled. In contrast to her experiences in Poland, she perceived Soviet society as comparatively integrative; she received a scholarship as well as accommodation in the dormitory of the Minsk Conservatory. In this context, she gradually began to identify herself as a Belarusian musician.

Her artistic identity was shaped to a significant extent by the Soviet cultural climate, which—despite ideological control—opened new professional paths for women and initially offered Jewish artists a period of relative security. Of decisive importance for her musical development was her practical work as a répétiteur, particularly the improvisatory accompaniment of dance classes—a skill she had already acquired in Warsaw.

She soon mastered the Russian language and felt entirely in her element when engaging, for example, with the subtleties of musical settings of Pushkin’s poetry.

Collaboration with other musicians helped consolidate her position in the cultural life of the city. Together with Mieczysław Weinberg, she performed four-hand jazz improvisations on Belarusian radio: “They would place a large clock in front of us, and we played by ear a potpourri of songs from American films. We merely agreed on the opening key—and then we simply improvised.”

In the course of the preparations for the “First Decade of Belarusian Art” in Moscow (5–14 June 1940), Tyrmand was appointed pianist in the newly formed State Belarusian Symphony Orchestra. There she met her future husband, the violinist Israel Thursz, likewise a Polish-Jewish refugee.

The German invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 and the rapid advance of German troops, who had already entered Minsk by 28 June, made a second flight necessary. Tyrmand and Thursz traveled via Tashkent to Frunze (today Bishkek) in Kyrgyzstan. During this phase of existential threat, a chance encounter with the actress Ida Kamińska (1899–1980) proved crucial for her continued survival. Kamińska had accompanied the Lemberg State Yiddish Theatre (GosET) during its evacuation to Central Asia and led the ensemble under precarious conditions. Tyrmand was appointed musical director of this evacuated theatre; she reconstructed the music from memory and accompanied the performances on the piano.

Her activities in Frunze were diverse: she directed a jazz ensemble for munitions workers, founded a children’s choir for orphans from besieged Leningrad, and composed songs for the Polish army. During this period, her first independent work, Improvisation and Dance (1945), was created, explicitly drawing on Jewish musical traditions—synagogal cantor chants and klezmer music.

Towards the end of the war, Tyrmand received news of the death of her entire family in the Warsaw Ghetto—a traumatic event that left a lasting mark on the rest of her life.

After returning to Minsk in 1948, Tyrmand entered a phase of further professional development. She studied composition with Anatoly Bogatyryov, a leading representative of the postwar Belarusian composition school. In 1954, she became the first woman admitted to the Belarusian Union of Composers. In addition to her compositional work, she made foundational contributions to music education by establishing the répétiteur program at the Minsk Conservatory, shaping generations of musicians over decades. Her teaching was characterized by the cultivation of stylistic precision and a deep understanding of the semantics of musical texts. As a cultural mediator, she also contributed to the reception of Western composers such as Mahler, Stravinsky, and Szymanowski in Belarusian musical life.

Tyrmand’s compositional oeuvre, though limited in quantity, is distinguished by high craftsmanship and pronounced theatrical expressiveness. Her musical language operates within an expanded tonal framework that approaches atonality and incorporates polytonal and modal elements. A major focus of her work was chamber music, especially for string instruments and piano, not least facilitated by collaboration with her husband. Key works include the Sonata for Viola and Piano (1961), the first significant Belarusian work for this instrumentation, and the Piano Suite (1962), whose modern, dissonant language initially met with some resistance. Characteristic of her working method was a strong perfectionism; at times, her critical self-evaluation meant that she completed only a single work in its final form within a year.

The final decades of her life were marked by increasing personal isolation and health challenges. Her husband Israel Thursz suffered from the psychological consequences of the Shoah and later from dementia before his death. His passing meant the loss of her beloved partner and her last remaining familial support. Tyrmand herself lost almost all of her sight due to unsuccessful cataract operations in old age. During this late creative phase, she composed the Elegiac Improvisation for Violin and Piano (1988), a work explicitly dedicated to the memory of her family murdered in the Holocaust. She described it as her most treasured work—an “improvised requiem” that contains no direct quotations but draws on Jewish musical traditions with intense emotional concentration.

Despite her outwardly strict and professional demeanor as a teacher, her inner life was deeply marked by grief and enduring sorrow. Eta Tyrmand passed away on 29 April 2008 in Minsk at the age of 91. Her estate is now preserved in the Museum of the History and Culture of the Belarusian Jews in Minsk, documenting her lasting contributions as a musician, educator, and cultural mediator.