The Polish composer Karol Szymanowskiwas born in the Ukraine, once part of the kingdom of Poland, but studied in Warsaw, much influenced by Chopin and then by Wagner, Richard Strauss, Brahms and Reger. From a well-to-do and cultured family, he read widely, particularly during the years of war, from 1914 to 1917, when he remained on the family estate in the Ukraine, a property destroyed in the civil war. The breadth of his cultural knowledge is reflected in his music and in particular in his settings of literary texts of one kind or another. Musically he is able at times to draw on specifically Polish material, coupled with his own perceptions of Arabic and Persian culture.
The principal opera of Szymanowski is King Roger, a work influenced by the Bacchae of Euripides. Here Dionysus returns to similar effect in medieval Sicily. The ballet Harnasie won some success at its first performance in Prague, followed by performance in Paris.
A number of Szymanowski's compositions rely on texts of one sort or another, from his Salome, a fashionable subject, in 1906, to Penthesilea, Love-Songs of Hafiz, the third symphony, with its Song of the Night, from Mevlana, Songs of a Fairy-Tale Princess and Songs of the Infatuated Muezzin, to a setting of the Stabat mater and Veni Creator and the 1933 Litany of the Virgin. His purely orchestral works include two violin concertos and three other symphonies, the fourth and last in the form of a sinfonia concertante for piano and orchestra.
Among the best known of Szymanowski's smaller scale works is Myths, for violin and piano, three pieces, La fontaine d'Arthuse, Narcisse and Dryades et Pan, a violin sonata, Nocturne and Tarantella and a Romance. His two string quartets are less often performed.
Piano Music
Polish tradition is perpetuated in Szymanowski's twenty Mazurkas. Other piano music includes Masques, Metopes, characteristic titles, and sets of Etudes.
Orchestral Music and Music for Voice and Orchestra
The last of Szymanowski's four symphonies, a Symphonie concertante with solo piano, was completed in 1932, a vehicle for his own performance, while the Third Symphony, Song of the Night, sets words by the Sufic mystic Mevlna. Other works for voice and orchestra include settings of poems by Hafiz, Demeter, for female chorus and orchestra, based on the Bacchae of Euripides, a Stabat mater and a Veni Creator, settings of the traditional medieval Latin texts, and a Litany to the Virgin Mary. His orchestral compositions also include two violin concertos.
Vocal and Choral Music
Some of the songs that appear as works for voice and orchestra also exist in a parallel form with piano accompaniment. His settings otherwise range from the literary to the reworking of folk-songs.
