7/24/20

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Karol Szymanowski (1882-1937)

For my penultimate post, I wanted to showcase one more example from the long list of my own favorite piano pieces. Today’s selection comes from Polish composer Karol Szymanowski, who (as you might expect) first caught my attention because of his brilliant - and seemingly unpronounceable - last name. During my first year of working in the library at the Blair School of Music, I would often make note of scores and books with interesting call numbers (which are the alphanumerical codes labeled on the side to help librarians find and sort physical materials). Without going into too much depth, scores often feature one line signifying the composer - a period followed by the first letter of their last name with a three digit number (which roughly shows where the name would fall alphabetically). For example, a score written by Jean Sibelius would have the bit “.S564” -meaning that the name “Sibelius” falls roughly 56.4% of the way through names that start with “S” - and yes, before you ask, I have committed the number 564 to memory. I bring this all up to say that one day, a score with the line “.S999” caught my eye, and since then I have been listening to and analyzing the music of Karol Szymanowski.

As perhaps one the most celebrated Polish composers since Frédéric Chopin, Karol Szymanowski joins the ranks among many other “greats” as a composer who wrote predominantly for the piano. Between his three sonatas for piano as well as several collections of preludes, etudes, and mazurkas, Szymanowski’s output as a composer shows one man’s exploration into the musical world beyond romanticism. So, while it may seem like a recurring theme in my series of posts, I believe that looking at music written towards the tail end of and in response to the Romantic era can be both interesting and rewarding. Szymanowski’s 9 Preludes, Op. 1 is his first published set of pieces, giving us a unique insight into the mind of someone who moved from clearly romantic origins to atonalism and folk music. You will most certainly hear influence from composers like Chopin and Alexander Scriabin in this collection of piano pieces, but digging a little deeper helps to show the direction of Szymanowski’s style. First, it might help to look at the elements of the preludes that make them sound familiar and romantically grounded: melodic drive, functional harmony, and intuitive pianistic textures. There is no getting around Szymanowski’s ability to write a melody so simply beautiful that you find yourself humming it several hours later. Supporting that is the harmonic language of these pieces which, while still throwing in a healthy amount of chromatic flair, stays true to the same conventions developed decades before. That being said, however, there are some elements in the harmony that show development away from ‘tradition’: even in No. 1, we see how Szymanowski uses successive, stark modulations to twist the harmony around in unexpected ways. This also brings me to the texture of these preludes which deceptively comes across as similar to the textures of early romantics. Karol Szymanowski and Scriabin share their love for polyrhythms, and 9 Preludes, Op. 1 certainly shows that. Whether it’s 2 against 3, 5 against 2, or some complicated polyrhythm involving syncopation, Szymanowski uses these textures to make the listeners think of Franz Liszt while also challenging the performers in complicated ways.

While this collection of pieces certainly warrants more extensive analysis, I do want to keep this post on the shorter side - much like my post on a set of pieces by Sergei Bortkiewicz, I believe that these piano pieces will speak for themselves. My personal favorite out of the nine is No. 1, which I performed (for one of the courses in the keyboard curriculum at Blair) and also arranged for string quintet (for my orchestration course). It was only after both of those experiences that I felt like I began to understand Karol Szymanowski’s place in the western canon. If you take away one major point from this post, I believe that it should be to question why some music you listen to sounds familiar or alien - it does not take extensive theoretical knowledge to try to articulate musical qualities. With that, I would also encourage you to listen to one of Karol Szymanowski’s later works, in which you may see what I mean in “diverging away from the romantic tradition.” A great example of that would be his Sonata No. 3 for piano, which takes rapid modulation to the extreme, bordering on complete atonality. Below I am linking a recording (accompanied by the score) of 9 Preludes, Op. 1. Completed in 1900, they show a remarkably sophisticated style for a composer who would have only been 18 years old.