Karol Szymanowski

Karol Szymanowski born 6 October 1882 (d. 1937)

Karol Maciej Korwin-Szymanowski was a Polish composer and pianist.

Szymanowski was born to a wealthy land-owning family of the Polish gentry in Tymoszówka, then in the Russian Empire, now in present-day Ukraine. He studied music privately with his father before going to Gustav Neuhaus' Elizavetgrad School of Music from 1892. From 1901 he attended the State Conservatory in Warsaw, of which he was later director from 1926 until retiring in 1930. Musical opportunities in Russian-occupied Poland being quite limited at the time, he travelled widely throughout Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and the USA. These travels, especially those to the Mediterranean area, provided much inspiration to the composer and esthete.

With his friend Stefan Spiess, he visited Sicily in 1911 and Algiers and Tunis in 1914. Szymanowski, not unlike other European gay artists, such as Baron von Gloeden, Oscar Wilde, and André Gide, found the spectacle of unabashed boy-love in the less inhibited southern climate to be psychologically liberating and, thereby, an inspiration to his art.

Szymanowski celebrated his newly liberated sexuality in his music. After the Sicilian visit, the melancholy of his earlier work was vanquished by the joy that would be present throughout the rest of his creative life.

The fruits of these trips included not only musical works, but poetry and his novel Efebos, parts of which were subsequently lost in a fire in 1939, although not the main part, which was translated by him into Russian and given as a gift in 1919 to Boris Kochno, his 15 year-old beloved.

Boris Kochno was a precocious boy from a noble Russian family and a budding poet. Szymanowski fell deeply in love and wrote poems to him. Among these are Ganymède, Baedecker, N'importe, and Vagabond. His passion was for a time reciprocated. However, unknown to Szymanowski, Boris also became the lover of the redoubtable Sergei Diaghilev.

Szymanowski was influenced by the music of Richard Wagner, Richard Strauss, Max Reger, Alexander Scriabin and the impressionism of Claude Debussy, and Maurice Ravel. He also drew much influence from his countryman Frédéric Chopin and Polish folk music. Like Chopin he wrote a number of mazurkas for piano. Carefully digesting all these elements, eventually Szymanowski developed a highly individual rhapsodic style and a unique harmonic world of his own. He was one of the most original of 20th Century composers. He is interesting not only for his music, but also because he was well-known to be gay in his time and his artistic development is clearly linked to his sexual orientation.

Among Szymanowski's better known orchestral works are four symphonies and two dream-like violin concertos. His stage works include the ballets Harnasie and Mandragora and the operas Hagith and Król Roger ('King Roger'.) He wrote much piano music, including the four Etudes, Op. 4 (of which No. 3 may be his single most popular piece), many mazurkas and the exquisite and highly individual Métopes. Other works include the Three Myths for violin and piano, two masterful string quartets, a sonata for violin and piano, a number of orchestral songs (some to texts by Hafiz and James Joyce) and his Stabat Mater, an acknowledged choral masterpiece.

Homoeroticism is discernible in much of his music, especially in such works as Love Songs of Hafiz and Third Symphony - Song of the Night, for tenor solo, a setting of a poem by the 13th century Persian poet Rumi. Homosexuality becomes visible in his works through ancient themes (Myths), and the choice of implicitly homosexual texts.

He died in a sanatorium in Lausanne, Switzerland after a long from tuberculosis or as other sources say, throat cancer.

UNESCO declared 1982 as the International Year of Karol Szymanowski.