Szymanowski: 20 Mazurkas, Op.50

Introduction

The Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 crashed in upon Szymanowski's life of cultivated leisure with brutal force, bringing to an end his middle period and the series of fantastic masterpieces which filled it -- The Love-Songs of Hafiz; the Métopes and Masques for piano; the Third Symphony ("Song of the Night"); the glowing, hallucinatory First Violin Concerto; and, above all, the unfinished torso of his Dionysian opera, King Roger. Tymoszówka, the family estate in Ukraine, was overrun and trashed, and the composer spent two traumatic years in Elisavetgrad, taking stock in a novel, The Ephebe (now lost), reading widely, and guarding the door against thugs. But the Revolution also brought about Polish independence the following year, and the Szymanowskis were able to return to Poland on Christmas eve 1919. A number of incomplete and unpublished works date from this period -- a sort of musical stammering. Szymanowski did not again hit his stride as a composer until 1921 -- and in quite a different vein (indebted to Stravinsky's example) -- with the song cycle Slopiewnie, which incorporated folk elements in an evocation of a "Lechitic" or ancestral, tribal, Polish consciousness. From 1922, he began to spend as much time as possible in Zakopane, a resort in the Tatra mountains, and to absorb the raucous, improvised, archaic music of the highlanders, which informs the works of his final period. Among these, the 20 Mazurkas, composed over 1924-25, exhibit the sophisticated primitivism of his late style in its most etched, unequivocal form. Over the drones in open fifths and pedal points of minor seconds typical of Tatra music, he weaves a discourse of modal and bitonal inflections, with ever-varying, seemingly improvised melodic ornamentation, set off by the mazurka's characteristic rhythmic bounce. A number of them open with a tentative melodic tendril -- a sort of falling highland call -- before giving way to exuberance escalating to delirium. A droll garrulity, albeit astringently strutted, shimmers from pungency to piquancy, rendering this potentially hermetic idiom accessible and poised as a twentieth century Polish response to the mazurkas of Chopin.

Parts/Movements

1. No. 1 Sostenuto - Molto rubato
2. No. 2 Allegramente - Poco vivace
3. No. 3 Moderato
4. No. 4 Allegramente, risoluto
5. No. 5 Moderato
6. No. 6 Vivace
7. No. 7 Poco vivace
8. No. 8 Moderato
9. No. 9 Tempo moderato
10. No. 10 Allegramente - Vivace - Con brio
11. No. 11 Allegretto
12. No. 12 Allegro moderato
13. No. 13 Moderato
14. No. 14 Animato
15. No. 15 Allegretto dolce
16. No. 16 Allegramente - Vigoroso
17. No. 17 Moderato
18. No. 18 Vivace - Agitato
19. No. 19 Poco vivace - Animato e grazioso
20. No. 20 Allegramente - Con brio