Molitwa dziewicy, or A Maiden's Prayer, is virtually the only remnant of the otherwise unremarkable career of amateur Polish musician Tekla Badarzewska. Self-taught as a composer, Badarzewska produced a number of flowery salon works with sentimental titles such as Memories of a Hut, Sweet Dreams, and Memories of a Friendship, all of which gained a modest level of commercial success in their day. A Maiden's Prayer, however, totally eclipsed the composer's other efforts. Originally published in 1856, in the composer's native city of Warsaw, the piece became a middlebrow favorite throughout Europe and America during the succeeding decades. It enjoyed numerous reprints by various publishing houses, as well as reincarnations in various multi-pianist transcriptions and arrangements for a variety of instrumental and vocal combinations. The piece, essentially a short set of variations, is unabashedly sentimental, its syrupy chromatic inflections and overwrought gestures coming across to modern ears as rather comical. The theme consists of a series of rising arpeggios answered by stepwise descending lines, the melodic arcs taking more elaborate paths up and down with each successive reiteration. The climactic rendition of the melody is so heavy laden with chromatic figurations and rhythmic ornamentation as to turn the initially plaintive melody into a blurry, maudlin soliloquy. Of course, critical derision trumps popular taste only in the mind of the critic; few pieces in the latter half of the twentieth century were played in as many homes as was this one. Thus, what must then be taken with a grain of salt is the perfunctory verdict rendered by Zofia Chechliska in her entry on Badarzewska in the New Grove's Dictionary: "The Maiden's Prayer," Chechliska matter-of-factly posits, "is of no artistic merit." Still, it is apparent that by the early twentieth century, Badarzewska's lone salon hit had come to embody the kind of cheap, cliché expressivity of Romanticism that modernism so despised. In their trenchant opera Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny from 1929, Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht wrote Badarzewska's hit into the plot. In a scene inside a bar in the decadent city of Mahagonny, a pianist plays strains of The Maiden's Prayer to the delight of the intoxicated crowd. As the piece reaches its rhapsodic climax, one of the bar patrons raises his glass and, referring to the music, dreamily pronounces "Das ist das ewige Kunst!" (Now that's what I call Eternal Art!).

© All Music Guide