The recently finished 66th Eurovision Festival, abounded – just as it often did before – in non-artistic events and emotions, this time related to Poland. The festival was won by Ukraine, as it had to be for the very reasons that the European Broadcasting Union traditionally renounces issuing statements about the apolitical character of the festival. Unless the Ukrainian song was the best regardless of the circumstances. Such a possibility should be taken into account and immediately noted down in the records just to be voiced and heard.

The Polish song has honourably ranked itself among the top twenty, which has been the fate of Polish songs for many years. However, that is not the point.

The minister distances himself and the ambassador apologizes

The Ukrainian jury did not award Poland a single point or, reputedly, one juror admitted something, but apparently it was lost on the lines, which in fact works out the same. Poland got zero from Ukraine in a situation where Ukraine got everything possible from Poland. And this - as the Internet rumour had it - when we received a huge number of Ukrainian refugees in record time. Bitterness, regret, and the threat of a rupture in the perfect relations between our states and nations are only too natural a consequence.

Of course, artistic values - if such a term can be used with reference to Eurovision – play no role here. What matters are completely different issues, those that are in fact forbidden by the EBU (European Broadcasting Union) in the evaluation of works, namely, emotions. Embittered Poles, and Ukrainians for that matter, are somewhat comforted by the fact that Poland received the maximum number of points in the voting of the Ukrainian audience. The Ukrainian jury was treated severely on the Ukrainian Internet. Social media users demanded an explanation and wrote that we should not be offended because the jury does not represent the society and that its assessment was incomprehensible to Ukrainian viewers, etc.

Ukraine’s Minister of Culture distanced himself from the decision of Ukrainian song experts, and the chairman of the Verkhovna Rada (Ukrainian parliament) stated on Twitter that the Ukrainian jury was far removed from its society, an issue that should be investigated further in the future. Indeed, the Ukrainians sitting in front of their TV sets gave the Polish representative the maximum number of votes. The Ukrainian ambassador to Poland apologized to the Poles for the jury from his country.

As can be clearly seen from the above, the whole affair was about pure art that views politics with a due distance, or even with disdain. But seriously, the very existence of national teams in music competitions or in sports builds the atmosphere of a kind of proxy wars, where the very word “war” should be treated with a pinch of salt. Meanwhile, Poland helps Ukraine in a real war and hence the whole fuss.

In the history of Eurovision, it didn’t take background wars for politics and ideology to influence the results. There are countries that always vote for each other and some that always vote against each other. Political commitment forces performers to smuggle symbols that the EBU’s political correctness combats with varying degrees of success.

The times of the 1950s and 1960s, when performers wearing evening dresses and tailcoats simply sang songs, while the jury assessed them without paying attention to political undertones and contexts, are probably gone forever. For all that, there were no such political ingredients at that time but, when the circumstances emerged, they started to be necessarily taken into account.

In the dispute over the vote of the Ukrainian jury the artistic values of either Ukrainian or Polish representatives are entirely overlooked. The aesthetic criteria seem simply irrelevant. The Ukrainian authorities take efforts to save the Polish-Ukrainian friendship by cutting themselves off from the jury’s vote. Of course, we deserve their gratitude, and they deserve our compassion. Those who do not adhere to such an opinion on the occasion of the song competition commit a gigantic faux pas.

What if the Ukrainian jurors really didn’t like the Polish performance?

The Chairman of the Ukrainian Verkhovna Rada means a very high level. The highest possible in fact since the President of Ukraine limits his remote speeches to the most important film festivals. Is the world going crazy? Or, can we say, “all of it has happened before”? Yes, it has – no events in history are exactly the same, but still.

The Icon of the Risorgimento

One of Luchino Visconti’s first films, “Senso”, includes a scene of the audience’s reaction to the aria “Di quella pira” sung by Manrico, the titular character of Giuseppe Verdi’s opera “Il Trovatore“. The audience is storming, the Austrian officers present in the theatre are starting to feel uncomfortable, something is in the air. This is an excellent illustration of how music, written without any political undertones, became - as we would put it today - the soundtrack of Italy’s reunification.

The libretto of “Il Trovator“e contains no references to either Italy or the Risorgimento in, and the fight against tyranny is Manrico’s struggle with the wicked Count di Luna for a woman whom he loves, and for the life of another whom he thinks is his mother. The music of “Di quella pira” strikes a heroic tone and inspires action, but neither the librettist nor the composer had Austria in mind when creating Count di Luna, or Italy when creating Manrico. The audience heard what they wanted to hear at a given moment in history.

Giuseppe Verdi supported Risorgimento and admired its leaders, but it is highly doubtful whether he was overwhelmed with these feelings when he wrote the famous “Va pensiero”, a chorus of the Hebrew slaves from the opera “Nabucco“. As biographers write, he was reluctant to begin his work on the opera and started it only after long persuasions. Which, nevertheless, did not prevent “Va pensiero” from becoming a kind of anthem of Risorgimento, and fashioned Verdi himself into its iconic figure.

Teatro La Fenice/YouTube

With the growing popularity of the composer, supporters of Italy’s unification started to write “Viva V.E.R.D.I.” on the walls and no Austrian patrol could find fault with it. For both the authors of those inscriptions and the passers-by, the words meant: “Viva Vittorio Emanuele Re Di Italia” (Long Live Victor Emmanuel King of Italy), because the king of Sardinia was at that time seen by the unites as the potential leader of the united country.

Not so long ago, in Poland, another performance had similar political repercussions. In 1967, the director and manager of the National Theatre, Kazimierz Dejmek decided to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution with Adam Mickiewicz’s “Dziady“ (“Forefathers’ Eve“) and even planned to go to Moscow with the performance. Dejmek, an honest communist, did not expect that the public and - above all - the authorities would interpret Mickiewicz’s protest against the white tsarism as a rebellion against the red one. He failed to sense the associations and analogies, otherwise clear to everyone. For the director, the shackles on Konrad’s hands were the past, the history, for the audience it was a symbolic representation of the very times in which they lived.

The rebellion provoked from the stage should, however, not be exaggerated, everyone knew the situation. A few pro-freedom shouts that might be considered anti-Soviet by those more cautious comrades were raised from the audience, and the show was warmly applauded.

The authorities did not tolerate it for long. Only 11 performances were staged, and those, over the years, took on the hue of a real legend of the opposition movement. The first secretary of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party felt the tectonic shifts under his seat to such a degree that in one of his speeches he ventured into areas he had not known before: “I don’t know if the director has the right to introduce a dedication to the stage content of the performance, with which the author provides his work [...] or is it allowed to order the actors to address the audience straight from the ramp?” Until then, Władysław Gomułka - when he wanted to be meticulous, that is, always - talked about tons of coal and steel, the amount of fertilizers per hectare and quintals collected per hectare.

It could even seem funny...

Just for the sake of good order, one could say here: “Try to keep the sense of proportion, Mister” – how does Mickiewicz or Verdi compare to Eurovision? Meanwhile, the described mechanism applies both to high and popular art. Someone creates something and the moment the work crosses the boundary of the ramp, screen, or loudspeaker, it begins to live its own life, often unforeseen by the author. The authors, if the perception of the work is consistent with their views, may agree with the unexpected interpretation.

Giuseppe Verdi accepted his role of the icon of the Risorgimento, and even, reluctantly though, allowed himself to be elected to the parliament of a united Italy. The author of the winning song at the last Eurovision Song Contest wrote it shortly before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The titular Stefania is his mother, and the song was written about her and for her, without any undertones. The war turned the lovable and respectable mother into a personification of the fighting Ukraine, and everyone heard what they wanted to hear under the new circumstances.

Did the emperor in Vienna understand in what context and with what undertones Verdi’s works were perceived in northern Italy in the second half of the 19th century? He couldn’t help but understand. In the case of “Dziady“, the first secretary did not only grasp both the context and the implications of the reception of Kazimierz Dejmek’s performance, but he also co-created them. The heroine of the song “Stefania” is a suffering and fighting Ukraine according to the wish of the audience, the author and the performers, a group of Ukrainian patriots. Needless to say, such an interpretation must have been supported by the Ukrainian authorities as well.

And, as regards the sense of proportion that should be kept when talking about culture and mass culture, as well as about ours and past times. For the Ukrainians and the Europeans who sympathize with them it comes as no surprize that the themes of life and death, despair and hope are conveyed by a piece performed by a clown-looking band with the most attention-grabbing, ape-curving individual, whose tattoos have only stopped in the eye sockets. We can see the sign of the times.

The Eurovision Festival is not generally associated with bringing up important matters and the most important topics. From among all the star performers and bands participating in Eurovision since 1956, two can be named that were already known at that time and whom the festival made even more famous. It’s Celine Dion and ABBA.

Meanwhile, such an event, and not even the event itself, but one of the accompanying Internet disputes, engages the authorities of one country, not wanting another country to feel offended. And it could even seem funny, were it not for the fact of a real war going on in the background of these “events”.

In 2017, an individual entered the Eurovision stage, took off his pants and showed the audience what he had been sitting on so far. The transmission was not interrupted, all of Europe, and the world beyond, saw it. Nobody seems to be bothered by a song presented on the Eurovision stage, which the political context turns into a hymn-like manifesto - there is a clip on the Internet with an Ukrainian soldier singing it in the trenches above the sandbags. Anything can be accompanied by anything, and no one feels offended. Neither are the performers of the song in question.

- Krzysztof Zwoliński

TVP WEEKLY. Editorial team and jornalists

- Translated by Ewa Sawicka