Irène Régine Wieniawska: An Attempt to Reconstruct the Life and Work of the Composer

Irène Régine Jessy Maria Wieniawska was born on 16th May 1879 in Brussels as the youngest child of an outstanding Polish violinist and composer of the 19th century, Henryk Wieniawski, and Isabelle Bessie Hampton-Wieniawska. As the only one of Wieniawski’s children, she followed the footsteps of her father and chose the profession of a musician. This work brings focus to the lesser known facts from the composer’s life, which greatly impacted the formation of her creative character, including the fact that Irène Wieniawska used a considerable number of pseudonyms, which allowed her to keep her anonymity and therefore resulted in part of her work to be forgotten for many years. As in several cases of other female composers of the early 20th century, the name Wieniawska is currently poorly recognised, even though she was a known composer and performer in London between the years 1900–1932. Wieniawska’s songs were very popular, and her creative legacy remains equally interesting, which I would like to draw attention to in my paper and discuss the latest catalogue of her works, developed by me