Karol Szymanowski

• Born: October 3, 1882, Tymoshivka, Russian Empire (now Ukraine)
  
• Died: March 29, 1937, Lausanne, Switzerland

Concerto No. 1 for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 35

• Composed: 1916
  
• Premiere: November 1, 1922 in Warsaw, Poland with Józef Ozimiński, violin 
• Instrumentation: solo violin, 3 flutes (incl. piccolo), 3 oboes (incl. English horn), 3 clarinets (incl. E-flat clarinet), bass clarinet, 3 bassoons (incl. contrabassoon), 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, crash cymbals, glockenspiel, snare drum, suspended cymbals, tambourine, triangle, 2 harps, celeste, piano, strings
• CSO notable performances: First: November 1931, Eugene Goossens conducting and violinist Paul Kochanski. Most Recent: February 2012, John Storgårds conducting and violinist Christian Tetzlaff. 
• Duration: approx. 26 minutes

Contrary to what is often believed, Romanticism and modernism are not mutually exclusive in the music of the early 20th century. Radical modernists like Schoenberg and Webern always stressed their links to Wagner and Mahler, as did Stravinsky to Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov. One is almost tempted to say that it was a modern musical language that allowed these composers, and others, to be truly Romantic in the first place, in the sense of celebrating the individuality of the creative spirit and exploring topics distant in time and space or otherwise unusual.

            Karol Szymanowski is one of the most fascinating composers among ‟modernist Romantics.”  Touched in equal measure by Strauss, Debussy and Scriabin, he united those international influences in a distinctly personal style that, moreover, became more and more specifically Polish as his career progressed. 

Szymanowski spent his youth in Warsaw surrounded by artists who sought innovation and renewal. His literary and artistic friends, who formed the movement ‟Young Poland,” merged national elements with a strong sense of the exotic. Before long, Szymanowski, violinist Paweł Kochański and conductor Grzegorz Fitelberg, banded together as ‟Young Poland in Music,” determined to catch up with the rest of Europe. To Szymanowski, East Asia exerted at least as strong an influence as did the contemporary art of the West. By 1911, he was writing songs based on lyrics of the Persian classic poet Hafiz—in the German translation of the same Hans Bethge, whose work with Chinese poetry had inspired Mahler’s Song of the Earth just a few years earlier. A friend of Szymanowski’s, the poet Tadeusz Miciński (1873–1918), translated the poetry of Jalal’ad-Din Rumi, which the composer used in his Symphony No. 3 for soloist, chorus and orchestra (1914–16). 

            Szymanowski’s next major work after the Third Symphony was the First Violin Concerto which, an early biographer tells us, was inspired by an original work by Miciński, Noc majowa (‟May Night”), a symbolist poem that mixes Eastern and Western images in a fantastic amalgam. The poem speaks about a mysterious forest full of creatures real and imaginary, from donkeys and birds to the Nereids, the sea nymphs of Greek mythology, and Sheherazade, the Arab princess. ‟Today is my wedding with the goddess”—the poet exclaims at one point, and he listens in a state of near-ecstasy as ‟Pan plays on his pipes in the oak-grove.”

            The poem’s sophisticated exoticism and sultry atmosphere are reflected in the music, which begins with the eerie sounds of the strings playing both con sordino (“with mutes”) and sul ponticello (“on the bridge”). Oboes, clarinets, harp and piano interject brief, fluttering motifs, perhaps corresponding to the fireflies mentioned in the poem. The solo violin enters on a long-held high note that becomes the starting point of a soaring, ‟endless” melody. Commentators have tried, in various ways, to explain the formal structure of the 25-minute single movement that grows out of this extraordinary opening. This music surely has nothing to do with sonata or any other classical form; it is a completely original design in which effusively lyrical moments alternate with agitated passages. An intricate network of recurrent motifs runs through the work, linking its various sections as the music moves, somewhat like the ebb and flow of the ocean, from climax to respite to new climax. There are no fewer than five such surges, each culminating in a moment of high intensity. The solo violin, for the most part, hovers in the extreme high regions of its range, which adds greatly to the ecstatic mood that reigns throughout most of the concerto. The cadenza, shortly before the end, was written by Kochański, based on Szymanowski’s thematic material.

Szymanowski himself thought that he had written one of his best works with the First Violin Concerto. (The Second Concerto, the last major composition his declining health allowed him to complete, came 18 years later, in 1934.) Since Kochański had emigrated to the United States in the early 1920s, he was not available for the world premiere in Warsaw. But the proud composer gave his friend a full report:

The sound is so magical that people here were completely transfixed. And just imagine, Paweleczek, the violin comes out on top the whole time!

In his 1999 monograph on Szymanowski, English author Alastair Wightman writes that ‟the concerto is a magnificent integration of all the composer’s masks of those years:  the exotic and luxuriant, the whimsical and sensuous, the intoxicated and ecstatic.”  The use of the word ‟masks” may be explained by the fact that Szymanowski had written three Masques for piano just before the concerto (one of them dedicated to his friend and champion Arthur Rubinstein). But one may well wonder whether this style should be called a ‟mask” or, rather, an expression of the deepest essence of this great master, who was without a doubt the most significant Polish composer after Chopin.

—Peter Laki