Stefania Woytowicz

Stefania Woytowicz was born in Oświęcim, Poland, in October 1922 and studied at the Kraków State Higher School of Music with Olga Olgina, and later in Italy. She made her début with the Kraków Opera in 1948 in a concert of Polish songs and through the 1950s emerged as one of the leading Polish sopranos of the post-war concert and recital stage.

Her central repertoire was the soprano solos of the major German and Polish concert and oratorio works — Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the Bach Passions, the Handel oratorios, the Brahms *German Requiem*, the Mahler symphonies (particularly the Fourth, where her voice and refined musicianship made her a particularly valued partner for the Mahler conductors of the 1950s and 1960s), and the Górecki *Symphony No. 3* (the *Symphony of Sorrowful Songs* of 1976, in which she was the first recorded soprano under Ernest Bour). She worked extensively across Europe with the major orchestras and conductors of the period, and was a regular member of the Polish radio orchestra concert series. She also recorded a substantial body of Polish song repertoire (Karłowicz, Szymanowski, Chopin).

Woytowicz was awarded numerous Polish state honours. She died in Warsaw in September 2005. Music Preserved’s archive includes a range of her concert and oratorio work from the post-war European recital scene.