• Szymanowski, vol.3 (Chandos, 2014)

From early on, Szymanowski regarded the first movement as ‘some sort of contrapuntal-harmonic-orchestral monster’.  Its character is certainly dark-hued, and it progresses lyrically rather than dynamically, but it is far from the ‘monster’ that Szymanowski anticipated. In fact, it is marked by a yearning tenderness.  Its weakness, if indeed it is such, is its episodic nature and the lack of the obvious contrasts on which symphonic allegros were conventionally built.

When he wrote of the symphony in 1906 that ‘I don’t like it’, he qualified this by adding, ‘or rather, I like only the last movement, very light-hearted (lekkomyślna)’.  Despite this, the ‘frivolities’ (błahostki) and grazioso character of the Finale are hard to discern.  Its tone is even more Gothic than the climaxes of the first movement.  It proceeds from one earnest paragraph to the next, turbulent yet static despite its constant desire to push forward.  There is more than a touch of the Russian composer Scriabin in this music, and the portents of things to come – Szymanowski’s writing for the woodwind and the use of high solo violin – reinforce the impression that the First Symphony was, as Szymanowski suspected, a transitional work.

Love Songs of Hafiz, op.26

The premiere of Love Songs of Hafiz (Des Hafis Liebeslieder), op.26 took place on 12 September 1922, not in the concert hall but as the accompaniment to a ballet in the Grand Theatre, Warsaw.  The ballerina Halina Szmolcówna danced on stage while Adelina Czapska sang and Emil Młynarski conducted Szymanowski’s new song cycle.  The work was not completely new, however: the first three songs came from an earlier cycle of six songs, op.24 for voice and piano (1911), to which Szymanowski confusingly had given the same title.  Op.24 was premiered in 1912 by his sister, Stanisława, accompanied by their friend, Artur Rubinstein.  The orchestral set of eight songs, five of them new, did not receive its concert premiere until 1925, in Paris.

Although it belongs to a genre that includes concert staples such as Berlioz’s Les Nuits d’été, Mahler’s several song cycles, and Ravel’s Shéhérazade, Love Songs of Hafiz has never properly established itself in the repertoire.  Its allure stems partly from its texts and partly from the music’s developing Arabian idioms, a result of visits which Szymanowski had paid to North Africa in the years immediately before the Great War.  Mediterranean, North African, and Persian cultures fed his perpetual search for the exotic in art and in life.  Combined with his new-found admiration for Debussy and early Stravinsky, they produced an amalgam in his second-period works, composed during his wartime isolation at home in Tymoszówka, south-east of Kiev, which was extremely potent.

The texts of Love Songs of Hafiz are paraphrases by the German poet Hans Bethge (1876-1946), who followed a line of distinguished poets from Goethe and Rückert onwards who were entranced by the work of the Persian Shams al-Din Muhammad, better known as Hafiz (or Hafez) of Shiraz (1325/26-1389/90).  In turn, Szymanowski was not the first, nor the last, composer to set this renowned Sufi poet’s ghazals in translation.  The mystical visions of Hafiz merge earthly pleasures – love (often unrequited), loss, and death – with God, as revealed in the figure of the Beloved.  His invocations are highly personal, as in his references to his own grave.

The first three songs of op. 26, ‘borrowed’ from Op. 24, still show Germanic influence, although in their orchestral guise they reveal stylistic tendencies which would come fully to fruition in Szymanowski’s music during the Great War.  The most prescient of these three is ‘Tanz’ (Dance), the light-footed rhythms of which resurface in the Third Symphony and elsewhere.  The delicacy of Szymanowski’s new soundworld becomes especially apparent in the fourth song, ‘Die Perlen meiner Seele’ (The Pearls of My Soul).  The filigree combination of harp, triangle, piano, celesta, and glockenspiel is deliberately unearthly, and the subsequent addition of solo flute, violin, and clarinet adds to the languid atmosphere.

This is not to imply that the new songs cannot be full-blooded.  The playful exuberance of the sixth song (its Arabic atmosphere embodied in the soloist’s opening melodic idea) and the almost rowdy tone of the drinking song that follows show a Szymanowski full of ecstatic energy.  By contrast, the final song, ‘Das Grab des Hafis’ (The Tomb of Hafiz), is intimate and delicate.  Its melodic, harmonic, and textural character matches the heady language of Hafiz’s verse, which swoons over the singing of the nightingales, the perfume of the flowers, and the intoxicating lure of wine.

Symphony no.3, op.27 ‘The Song of the Night’

The first performances of Szymanowski’s Third Symphony for solo tenor (or soprano), chorus, and orchestra were, to put it mildly, unsatisfactory.  The Russian conductor Aleksander Siloti had scheduled the premiere for 19 September 1916 during his concert series in Petrograd (now St Petersburg), but this plan came to nothing.  War and revolution continued to hamper the symphony’s progress into the concert hall in both Russia and Poland.  The first performance did not take place for another five years, far away in London, where Albert Coates conducted it on 24 November 1921.  The likely connection here is that Coates had been a pupil and friend of Siloti’s.

It seems scandalous today that the London premiere went ahead without any voices and was therefore wordless: the solo vocal part was assigned to a cello and the choral parts were played by the organ.  An appalled Fitelberg was at the concert and wrote to Szymanowski, who was in the United States: ‘Cynicism resulting in obscenity […] all naturally to keep costs down.’.  It was over two years before the symphony reached Warsaw, on 11 April 1924, this time with Fitelberg conducting and the solo part sung by the tenor Adam Dobosz.  The organ once more stood in for the choir.  Even so, the performance was enough to daze the eleven-year-old Witold Lutosławski, who was not yet aware of the major role he would play in Polish music after Szymanowski’s death.

The text is crucial for the Third Symphony and provides its subtitle, The Song of the Night.  It is by Hafiz’s famous predecessor, the Sufi poet Jalal al-Din al-Rumi (1207-1273), and it comes from his second Divan, ghazal No. 296. This time there were two stages in the translation.  A German version by Bethge was then translated into Polish by Tadeusz Miciński (1873-1918), the poet whose work Szymanowski had already set to music and whose poem ‘May Night’ would influence the First Violin Concerto (1916), the composition that immediately followed the Third Symphony.

The figure of the Beloved is again central, although here the poet calls him ‘dear friend’ (druhu).  In Rumi’s hands, the fusion of ‘friend’ and God is given an exalted though still sensuous tone by being located under the night sky, with its constellations of stars.  While Szymanowski received his initial inspiration from his experience of a summer night in Tymoszówka in 1914, the musical language blends Scriabin and Debussy with the music he had heard in Tunisia just a few months earlier.