THE GENRE CHARACTER PIECES OF KAROL SZYMANOWSKI: A COMPLETE RECORDING

Abstract

Karol Szymanowski (1882-1937) is a transitional figure whose work bridges late nineteenth-century romanticism and the twentieth-century movement away from tonality. The fifty-four genre character pieces, which are recorded on tape as the major portion of this study, delineate the evolution of his style: his origins in a highly chromatic nineteenth-century medium, influenced by Chopin and Skriabin; his flirtation with atonality; and finally, the realization of a personal twentieth-century style, affected by his exposure to the music of Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky, and Skriabin, and also by his immersion in the indigenous folk-music of one of the regions of his country. The Nine Preludes, Opus 1, completed by the time he was eighteen, are intensely personal, finely wrought and quasi-improvisational in nature. Even in some of these early, passionate outcries, which show the specific imprint of Chopin and early Skriabin, however, there is an avoidance of the resolution of dissonance which definitely mark Szymanowski as a twentieth-century composer. There are prophetic suggestions, here and in the Opus 4 Etudes, of atonality and also of the bitonality that dominates much of his later music. The Twelve Etudes, Opus 33, written in 1916 , are already in a full-fledged twentieth-century idiom. The etudes, which are dissonant, usually bitonal, tending toward atonality, show Szymanowski's desire to cast off conventional tonality. He uses seconds and sevenths as predominant colors, pentatonic scales, extended passages of parallel chords, heavy reliance on the tritone, persistent dissonance, and occasional whole-tone scales. The twenty-two Mazurkas written between 1926 and 1935 reflect Szymanowski's involvement with the mountaineers in the Goral region of the High Tatra Mountains in Southern Poland and his enchantment with their culture and their music. Like Bartok, whom he respected and admired, and whose music these late works most immediately resemble, Szymanowski seems to have found his ultimate expression through the indigenous music of his own country. Szymanowski continues in his use of dissonance and bitonality, although the modal orientation of the folk melodies induces a strongly tonal feeling.