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As a consolation prize another program was scheduled at the “beautiful Palace on the Water” in view of the Monument to Chopin in the Lazienki Park. Because I had missed the hotel shuttle, the organizer of this program himself came in his car to pick me up. We chatted on the way. He was a Chopin scholar, in his seventies with gray hair, who wore the collar of his white shirt over a disheveled dark sweater. Just as we passed the Opera house, he pointed to another lot nearby.
Chopin’s visage was all over Warsaw as part of the celebration of his anniversary. A big poster dominated the entrance to the campus of the University of Warsaw, his alma mater. The big show was the International Chopin Piano Competition, which has been held here every five years since 1949.
The “concert hall” here was a stately large room with elaborate moldings lining its high ceiling. It was heated by radiators which helped make it feel cozy. A portrait of Chopin was on the wall above a grand piano.
A large bowl of cut flowers, red, pink and purple, was on a stand next to a Bechstein piano. We sat in armchairs which had red cloth covers. The hall was not quite full, the tickets were 60 dollars each, the audience was mixed in age.
A man came out of his little corner of a make-shift office when he noticed my puzzlement. "English menu?" I pleaded. He pointed to the drawings on the wall, fresco images of which only a steaming cup of coffee looked appealing. Nothing else resembled what I might swallow as the first meal of the day.
That evening I saw some forty demonstrators before the Presidential Palace. “It is the party that lost in the last Presidential election,” I was told by one of them. They were using a bullhorn, but not even the Palace guards seemed to be paying much attention. I mentioned this demonstration to Eva and her daughter Irene at the reception following a Chopin concert the next day. They were forthcoming in their discussion of the Polish politics since the fall of the Communists and provided me with their distinct perspectives, each reflecting their different generations.
Beyond the lake is a statute of John III Sobieski, the monarch of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (the King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania) from 1674 to 1696. He was on his horse trampling a semi-naked vanquished enemy. Sobieski is remembered as an extraordinary military commander. His prominent foes were the Ottoman Turks and his greatest victory was the Battle of Vienna in 1683.
Only two other customers came in while I was at this bar. They stood eating at the semi-circular counter. I sat on a stool near a window. Fifty yards away I could see the current Presidential Palace of Poland, flanked by the Carmelite Church, and the legendary Bristol Hotel (which I would visit later).
Prince Józef Poniatowski looked imposing on his equestrian statue in the front courtyard of the Palace. But the statue of this former Minster of War had been transplanted here in the 1960s, as though for warehousing, after the Polish General Staff building several blocks away before which it originally stood was destroyed in the War.
A statue of Chopin was erected in the prime location by the lake in Lazienki Park in 1926 and, after its destruction by the occupying Germans, again (its replica) in 1958. Until recently this statue was the world's tallest Chopin monument. On summer Sundays free piano recitals of his compositions are performed at its foot.
Poniatowski's “Palace on the Water” is located on a lake watered by the Lazienki (baths) River in the property. The royal peacock pets still strut around here.
Now a favorite of the common folks, in the 18th century Lazienki was the summer residence of the last King of Poland, Stanislaw August Poniatowski (1764-95) who acquired it after ascending the throne in 1764.
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