Karol Szymanowski ‒ 9 Preludes, Op.1

Karol Szymanowski (1882 - 1937), 9 Preludes, Op.1 (1899 - 1900)

Performed by Martin Roscoe

00:00 - No. 1 Andante ma non troppo
02:11 - No. 2 Andante con moto
04:39 - No. 3 Andantino
06:02 - No. 4 Andantino con moto
07:34 - No. 5 Allegro molto - impetuoso
08:48 - No. 6 Leonto - Mesto
10:57 - No. 7 Moderato
13:48 - No. 8 Andante ma non troppo
16:32 - No. 9 Lento-mesto

Karol Szymanowski’s life and career may be seen, from our vantage point, as a twofold quest in which the personal and the national ran in parallel, or, perhaps, were intertwined. On the one hand, he was engaged in a typically post-Romantic search for self-realization as an artist, working towards a full development of his individual musical aims and sensibilities; while on the other, he came more and more to seek an authentic compositional voice that could be heard (one way or another) as distinctively Polish, and also as distinctively modern. Yet his intensity and subjectivism went hand in hand with a strong desire for a certain kind of resolved clarity in the finished musical form—classical finish achieved by another route, perhaps, as an expression of modernity. His aesthetic stance, or let us say more soberly his musical practice as a composer, was eclectic in a stylistic and technical sense. But the subtle power of his invention and his personal mode of utterance were resilient and original enough to absorb and individualize (rather than merely appropriate) such a range of influences, and so turn them to his own advantage.

Between Szymanowski’s early piano works and the Métopes (1915) lies a radical expansion and realignment of aesthetic and technique. This took him from immersion in the dense fugal thinking of Reger to a shadowing of the mature Scriabin’s startling transformation during the first decade of the twentieth century and the leavening, salutary influence of Ravel’s and Debussy’s weightless, diaphanous textures. Devotion to a national tradition dropped from the picture early on, and it is a wider significance, not intrinsic Polishness, that distinguishes Szymanowski in posterity.

The piano was an integral part of Karol Szymanowski’s musical life. He was seven when he began his first lessons on the instrument, studying initially with his father and then with his uncle, Gustav Neuhaus—whose son, Genryk (Heinrich or Harry), Szymanowski’s cousin, was later to be the teacher of Sviatoslav Richter, Emil Gilels and Radu Lupu. The Nine Preludes, Op 1, some of which may have been written when he was only fourteen, attracted the support of Artur Rubinstein, a valuable early champion. It was the third of his Four Études, Op 4, that brought Szymanowski his first taste of popular success. Throughout his life, his music was written at the piano, and it was playing the piano that fed him in a particularly difficult period of his career, in 1932–35; indeed, the Sinfonia Concertante, his Fourth Symphony, written in 1932, became a vehicle for his own performance—he was a highly capable pianist, though no virtuoso.