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The Warsaw premiere of the cantata Nieznany Żołnierz (The Unknown Soldier) by Mieczysław Sołtys, with orchestral parts reconstructed by Ignacy Zalewski, will take place on Poland’s National Independence Day, November 11, 2025, at the Temple of Divine Providence in Wilanów, following the solemn Mass at 9:00 a.m. The performance will be broadcast on TVP3. The cantata will be performed by the Representative Artistic Ensemble of the Polish Armed Forces, conducted by Lt. Col. Dr. Mariusz Dziubek.
The cantata Nieznany Żołnierz by Mieczysław Sołtys (born 1863 in Lviv – died 1929 in Lviv) will resound again after 100 years. This will be both its Warsaw premiere and the first performance in Poland since 1945.
The work was composed in 1925 to commemorate the exhumation and transfer to Warsaw of the remains of the Defender of Lviv (1918), who rests today in the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier on Piłsudski Square. The text was written by Stanisław Rossowski, a well-known Lviv poet, and the music by Mieczysław Sołtys, longtime director of the Conservatory and the Polish Music Society in Lviv, and composer of operas and oratorios. The cantata was first performed on October 30, 1925, in Lviv Cathedral by combined male choirs of the city and the orchestra of the 40th Infantry Regiment “Children of Lviv.”
The instrumental score of the cantata has not survived—only the choral parts, published in 1925, remain. In 2025, Prof. Ignacy Zalewski of the Fryderyk Chopin University of Music undertook the reconstruction of the orchestral score. The cantata reflects the significant stylistic transformations in Sołtys’s work that occurred in the 1920s, particularly in its harmonic language. It is a composition of considerable artistic ambition, written for a momentous occasion in the history of the reborn Polish state.
The initiative to revive the cantata was undertaken by Dr. Michał Piekarski of the Institute for the History of Science, Polish Academy of Sciences.
Press release
