Introduction
Alongside Karol Szymanowski, he has now been given a place in the pantheon of most eminent Polish composers in the first half of the twentieth century.
His artistic life was inextricably connected with the city of Lwów (Germ. Lemberg, now Lviv in Ukraine), but important traces of his work can also be found in other cities of the Lwów Province between the World Wars, such as Stryj (now Stryi in Ukraine) and Przemyśl (now in the Podkarpackie– Subcarpathian Voivodeship in Poland). As the Lwów-based music critic Adam Mitscha (active from 1929 in Katowice, Second Polish Republic (1918–1945)) rightly observed,
Dr Józef Koffler, who settled in Lwów around 1924, caused quite a commotion in that city’s music world
(Mitscha, Zawiłe ścieżki [Tangled Paths], typescript).
Despite its brevity (only 48 years), his life unfolded in a highly interesting sequence of stages, from a childhood in Stryj (1896–1914), his studies in Vienna (1914–1916 and 1920–1923) interrupted by military service (1916–1920), to his artistically and professionally most fruitful period in Lwów (1924–1941), and the last, tragic years under the German occupation, when he lived in various towns and villages in southern Poland (1942–1943/1944).