Karol Szymanowski: Meaning (information, definition, explanation, facts)

Karol Maciej Szymanowski (October 6, 1882 - March 29, 1937) was a Polish composer and pianist.

Szymanowksi was born in Ukraine. He studied music privately with his father before going to Gustav Neuhaus' Elizawetgrad School of Music from 1892 and, from 1901, the State Conservatory in Warsaw, of which he was later director from 1926 till retiring 1930. He travelled widely, throughout Europe and to the USA. He died in a sanatorium in Lugano or Lausanne, Switzerland while suffering from tuberculosis.

Szymanowski's was influenced by the music of Richard Strauss, Max Reger, Alexander Scriabin and the impressionism of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel. He also drew much influence from his countryman Frederic Chopin and Polish folk music, and like Chopin he wrote a number of mazurkas for piano (the mazurka being a Polish folk dance).

Among Szymanowski's better known works are his two violin concertos, the three Myths for violin and piano, his Stabat Mater, his four symphonies (No. 3 with choir and vocal soloists, No. 4 with a solo piano), the ballet Harnasie and his operas, Hagith and King Roger. He also wrote a quantity of piano music and a number of songs (some on texts by James Joyce). According to Jim Samson (1977), "Szymanowski adopted no thorough-going alternatives to tonal organization...the harmonic tensions and relaxations and the melodic phraseology have clear origins in tonal procedure, but...an underpinning tonal framework has been almost or completely dissolved away."

Source

• Samson, Jim (1977). Music in Transition: A Study of Tonal Expansion and Atonality, 1900-1920, p.131. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0393021939.