Karol Szymanowski

Born in 1882 into the Polish aristocracy, Karol Szymanowski grew up on his family’s estate in an area of Imperial Russia that is now Ukraine. He initially created a splash as one of the most ambitious and distinctive composers of the so-called “Young Poland” movement. Soon after, he found a musical voice that combined jugendstil lushness—such as in his Concert Overture of 1905—with the shimmering textures of French Impressionism, as in his three Mity (Myths) of 1915, and his Third Symphony of 1916. The First World War brought Poland its independence but cost Szymanowski his ancestral home. In the postwar years, his imagination roamed ever wider—to the classical world of the Mediterranean, and a half-imagined Orient, a culture he’d explored as early as 1914 in Love Songs of Hafiz. These were imaginative realms in which, as a gay man in a conservative society, he felt liberated to explore his sexuality—nowhere more potently than in his opera King Roger (1924). But Szymanowski also embraced the pungent, often spiky melodies and colours of Polish folk music, giving a renewed rhythmic drive to his Second Violin Concerto (1933) and the ballet Harnasie (1931). When he died of tuberculosis in 1937, he was already a giant of Polish culture. With champions including Simon Rattle and Krystian Zimerman, he’s come to be admired as one of the 20th century’s most original and seductive musical voices.