Essential Szymanowski
The most celebrated Polish composer of the 20th century, and arguably the greatest composer to come out of Poland since Chopin, Karol Szymanowski (1882-1937) was born into a wealthy family in Tymoszówka, then part of the Russian Empire and now in Ukraine. He didn't actually settle permanently in Poland until he was 38, though he made frequent visits to Zakopane, a town in the Tatra mountains. It was here that he immersed himself in the folk culture of the Goral and the idioms of Goral folk music can be heard in much of his music.
Read more…Szymanowski had a formal musical training and later became director of the State Conservatory of Warsaw. His early works show the influence of late-German romanticism as well as that of Scriabin, as exemplified in his first two symphonies and the Etude Op. 4 No. 3, where harmony rather than melody is brought to the fore, a distinct characteristic of his music. With limited musical opportunities in Russian-occupied Poland, he travelled widely, to Italy, Sicily, Northern Africa, the Middle East and the USA, meeting many artists and composers on his travels – encounters that had a major impact on his artistic development. Stopping in Paris in 1914 he encountered the music of Debussy and Ravel, and his subsequent output was much influenced by impressionism, Orientalism and the exotic. The worldwide revival of Szymanowski has been largely driven by his opera 'King Roger' (1918-24), written when Szymanowski had exhausted his fascination with Wagnerian neo-Romanticism and was looking for new inspirations. His music has a unique charm, rhapsodic and dreamy, with pungent harmonies, deep expression and sumptuous orchestration. And, in drawing on the folk idioms of his homeland, like Chopin he also created a national music which was sophisticated yet honest and elemental.
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