The third of our Festival weekend events in association with the exhibition Music & Migration in Georgian Edinburgh: The Story of Felix Yaniewicz, celebrating the co-founder of the first Edinburgh music festival of 1815.
Born in Vilnius in 1762, Yaniewicz began his musical career in the service of Stanislaus August Poniatowski, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania. Leaving for Vienna in 1785, he began a cosmopolitan career that would take him to Italy, Paris and finally to Britain; meanwhile the successive partitions of Poland led to the downfall of the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth and the annexation of his homeland by Russia. Yaniewicz never lost his attachment to the land of his birth, as witnessed by his motto ‘Pro Lithuania’. In this illustrated lecture, historian Robert Frost explores what it meant to be a Lithuanian patriot in exile, in a time of political upheaval.
