Karol Szymanowski

Polish classical composer

• Born: October 6, 1882
• Birthplace: Tymoszówka, Ukraine, Russian Empire (now Poland)
• Died: March 28, 1937
• Place of death: Lausanne, Switzerland

Composer Szymanowski developed an original and sophisticated musical style, transforming late Romanticism, Impressionism, and neoclassicism into a highly personal musical language.

The Life

Karol Maciej Szymanowski (shih-mah-NAWF-skee) was a child of a landowning family with a prestigious ancestry. He began piano lessons at home at the age of seven, and three years later he went to the neighboring Elisavetgrad to study piano and theory with Gustav Neuhaus. In 1901 Szymanowski moved to Warsaw to attend the Warsaw Conservatory as a part-time student, concentrating on piano, on composition (in the class of Zygmunt Noskowski), and on theory (in the class of Marek Zawirski). With Ludomir Rozycki and Mieczyslaw Karlowicz, fellow composers from the Warsaw Conservatory, Szymanowski formed a group called the Young Poland in Music. In 1905 the group established a small publishing business, the Polish Composers’ Press.

During the remaining years before the outbreak of World War I, Szymanowski undertook several international trips, to Germany, Austria, France, England, Italy, Algeria, and Morocco. Fascinated with German culture, he later developed a deep appreciation for Greek, Byzantine, and Islamic (Sufi) traditions.

During his childhood Szymanowski suffered a leg injury that did not heal properly, so he was exempt from military service. He spent the years between the outbreak of World War I and the Bolshevik revolution at home in Tymószowka, with occasional travels to Kiev, Moscow, Odessa, and St. Petersburg. During these formative years Szymanowski appeared as a pianist in concerts of his music, as a soloist and accompanist. He did not like performing, and contradictory reports exist regarding his abilities as a pianist. In 1917 the revolutionaries burned down his family home, and Szymanowski’s piano was thrown into a nearby pond. Between 1917 and 1919, the Szymanowski family remained in Kiev and later moved to Elisavetgrad.

In Kiev Szymanowski fell in love with a teenage Borys Kochno (later an assistant and lover of Sergei Diaghilev). The brief romance remains the only documented love affair in Szymanowski’s life. At that time Szymanowski worked on a homoerotic novel, “Efebos.” Only fragments of the work have been preserved.

In December, 1919, the Szymanowski family relocated to Warsaw. In October, 1920, Szymanowski was sent abroad by the Polish government to arrange concerts of Polish music. The trip included stops in Stockholm, Oslo, Copenhagen, London, and Paris. From London, Szymanowski made his first trip to the United States, where he visited Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New York, and Florida, and to Cuba. A second trip to the United States was undertaken the following year, with Szymanowski appearing as a pianist in concerts of his music. Among other performances, noteworthy was his concert with violinist Pawel Kochański at Columbia University on December 13, 1921.

During the immediate postwar years, Szymanowski’s music became more popular. His compositions were performed in Paris (1922, 1925), London (1921), New York City (1923), Prague (1924), and Vienna (1925). In Poland, a recently reborn country with a growing need for national music, Szymanowski gradually became a symbol of the nation’s creative powers.

In 1926 Szymanowski became the director of the Warsaw Conservatory. Because of ongoing conflicts among the faculty, he resigned from this post in 1929. Almost the entire year after his resignation was spent in a sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland, where he took treatment for various respiratory conditions.

Later, in 1930, Szymanowski became the principal of a new music school, the Polish State Academy of Music in Warsaw. The institution was dissolved in 1932. In 1930 and 1931 Szymanowski was awarded an honorary doctorate at Jagellonian University in Kraków, he was elected an honorary member of the International Society of Contemporary Music, and he became an honorary member of the Czech Academy of Arts.

In 1932 Szymanowski’s health began a rapid deterioration, and at the same time he found himself in a difficult financial situation. He resided mostly at the villa Atma in his beloved Zakopane, a mountain resort in the Polish Tatra Mountains, which he had visited for ten years.

In the last years of his life, he took several trips abroad: Denmark, Spain, Italy, Yugoslavia, Russia, Bulgaria, and Hungary in 1933; Germany and England in 1934; Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, France, Latvia, and Czechoslovakia in 1935; and southern France in 1936. Many of these trips included Szymanowski performing his newly composed Symphony No. 4. The ailing composer spent Christmas of 1936 in Nice, France, from where he was transferred to the sanatorium Clinique du Signal in Lausanne, Switzerland. He passed away a few months later from cancer of the larynx. His body was buried at the Skalka Cathedral in Kraków, Poland.

The Music

Szymanowski’s early output, which included piano variations, songs, preludes, and études, betrayed the clear influence of Frédéric Chopin, a composer who devoted himself almost entirely to the piano. Such was the clear expectation of the Polish public: The “next Chopin” was to be another exceptional composer for the piano. It was not until 1907 that Szymanowski composed his first symphony, at a time when he was under the powerful influence of post-Wagnerian Romanticism and of Aleksandr Scriabin’s chromaticism. In 1909 Szymanowski won the second prize in a composers’ competition in Berlin, for his prelude and fugue for piano.

Three friendships played an important role in Szymanowski’s life: the pianist Artur Rubinstein, the violinist Kochański, and the conductor Grzegorz Fitelberg. They inspired the composer to write a considerable amount of piano and violin music and orchestral works. In addition, Szymanowski’s creative powers were enriched by his extensive travels. In France, Szymanowski experienced the music of Igor Stravinsky, which at the time revolutionized the musical world. He knew personally Diaghilev, the director of the famous Ballets Russes in Paris. In Africa and Italy, Szymanowski discovered a source of inspiration that took him away from the Christian world. It seems apparent that Szymanowski dealt with sexual identity problems, and in these countries he discovered a world beyond Christian morality.

Myths: Three Poems for Violin and Piano. Composed in 1915, with the help of Kochański, Myths: Three Poems for Violin and Piano consists of pieces inspired by Greek mythology. The first movement, “La Source d’Arethuse” (the source of Arethusa), tells the story of Arethusa, who, while escaping an enamored pursuer, transforms herself into a water spring. However, her follower changes into a river and in this form crosses the ocean to finally join the waters of Arethusa’s source. The second composition, “Narcissus,” tells the legendary story of a youth who falls in love with his image when he sees it reflected in water and dies instantly. The third movement, “Dryades et Pan” (Dryads and Pan), represents the forest wanderings of nymphs and the god Pan, a half-human, half-goat creature who plays the flute. Myths, Three Poems for Violin and Piano is a collection of exquisite studies in tone color, formal discipline, and rhythmic structure.

Symphony No. 3. Composed in 1916 in Tymoszówka, and first performed in February of 1917, Symphony No. 3, Song of the Night, is a choral-orchestral composition with a solo tenor part. The text, in Polish translation, was borrowed from the poetry of Mevlana Djalal al-Din Rumi (1207-1273), a Persian Sufi mystic. This poem, typical of Rumi’s work, has several levels of meaning. On the mystical level, the poetry expresses an almost sensual yearning for unity with a higher being; on the humanistic level, it portrays yearning for sensual and spiritual fulfillment with an idealized special friend. The musical style suggests North African and Arabic sonorities.

The Influence of Zakopane. In 1922 Szymanowski settled in Zakopane, the mountain resort in the Tatra Mountains, spending many of his winters there. In the local folk song and dance, he discovered a source of inspiration quite different from that of Chopin, who was influenced by the folk music of the Polish central plains. Zakopane was more than a center of folk culture. At the time, the Polish intellectual and artistic elite spent vacations there, a vibrant cultural center where writers, poets, painters, and architects met to discuss their ideas.

Stabat Mater. Based on a Polish translation of the hymn by Jacopone da Todi from the thirteenth century, the work was completed in 1926 and performed first in Warsaw in 1929. International performances during the composer’s lifetime included those in Belgium and England. The composition is scored for orchestra, chorus, and three soloists. The composer was reluctant to write a religious work, but he later developed an attachment to this composition. The text, which portrays the sufferings of Mary under the cross on which her Son hangs crucified, expresses the suffering of all humanity. Szymanowski’s Stabat Mater is considered to be among the finest religious works ever written.

Harnasie. The Polish equivalent of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, the ballet was completed in 1931. It was first performed in Prague in 1935 and later, in 1936, at the Paris Opera House with the celebrated Serge Lifar dancing the role of the main character. The composer considered the idea of writing a ballet based on a story of Polish mountain people for about ten years. His purpose was to introduce Polish national music to the European scene. Jerzy Rytard, a friend of the composer, wrote the initial story line in 1923. The libretto (which describes a love story resulting in a kidnapping) plays a minor role in this work. The ballet’s musical richness relies on folk dances and songs, with rhythmic energy and lyric beauty. The work is one of the most treasured masterpieces of Polish music.

Musical Legacy

Although Szymanowski was the most well-known Polish composer after Chopin, his highly individual musical language did not find immediate followers. Szymanowski’s interest in Polish folklore influenced Polish music well into the 1960’s. Unlike Chopin, who composed almost entirely for the piano, Szymanowski produced works in a variety of musical genres, all of high artistic quality, an impressive output that inspired new generations of Polish composers.

Principal Works

ballet (music): Harnesie, Op. 55, 1935.

chamber works:Myths: Three Poems for Violin and Piano, Op. 30, 1915; Nocturne and Tarantella, Op. 28, 1915 (for violin and piano); String Quartet No. 1 in C Major, Op. 37, 1917; Three Paganini Caprices, Op. 40, 1918 (for violin and piano); String Quartet No. 2, Op. 56, 1927.

opera (music): Król Roger (King Roger), Op. 46, 1926.

orchestral works: Violin Concerto No. 1, Op. 35, 1916; Symphony No. 3, 1917 (Song of the Night); Stabat Mater, 1929; Symphony No. 4, Op. 60, 1932 (for piano and orchestra); Violin Concerto No. 2, Op. 61, 1933.

piano works: Piano Sonata No. 1 in C Major, Op. 8, 1910; Twelve Études, Op. 33, 1916.

Bibliography

Downes, Stephen. Szymanowski, Eroticism, and the Voices of Mythology. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2003. A musicological, philosophical, and psychological study of Szymanowski’s works. The book examines Szymanowski’s music and the influences of Greek mythology, Sufism, and Slavic paganism in the context of their relationship to the composer’s psyche.

Maciejewski, Boguslaw. Karol Szymanowski: His Life and Music. London: Poets’ and Painters’ Press, 1967. A concise account of Szymanowski’s life, representing a thorough introduction to the composer and his work. Includes a list of compositions and a calendar of events in Szymanowski’s life.

Samson, Jim. The Music of Karol Szymanowski. New York: Taplinger, 1981. Musicological analysis of Szymanowski’s compositions arranged in three stylistic periods. The author examines in detail the composer’s influences, stylistic novelties, harmonic language, and musical form, and he places the compositions in biographical context. Includes a list of compositions.

Szymanowski, Karol. Szymanowski on Music. Selected Writings of Karol Szymanowski. Edited and translated by Alistair Wightman. Lancaster, England: Toccata Press, 1999. This publication consists of articles by Szymanowski published in Polish during his lifetime. The composer discusses such issues as folk music, nationalism in music, music of contemporary composers, and the role of musical criticism in society.

Wightman, Alistair. Karol Szymanowski: His Life and Work. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 1999. A thorough look at Szymanowski, his environment, and his music, with several quotes from Szymanowski’s correspondence. It discusses the development of his personality and provides a well-written analysis of his music. Includes a chronological list of compositions and a catalog of literary works.