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Szymanowski’s Third Piano Sonata and First String Quartet and the Artistic Theory and Practice of Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz: ‘Pure Form’, Subjectivity, and the Burlesque
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 September 2024
Abstract
Karol Szymanowski and Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz were leading figures in Polish modernism. A thorough review of their relationship and an examination of Witkiewicz’s theory of ‘pure form’ and its applicability to music (via Witkiewicz’s literary portraits of Szymanowski, his attempts at composition, and the critical and theoretical extensions of his work by Konstanty Regamey) provides the basis for analysing the form and content of Szymanowski’s Third Piano Sonata and First String Quartet.
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- © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Royal Musical Association
Footnotes
I would like to thank Paul Cadrin and Alistair Wightman for kindly reading an early version of this article, the anonymous readers for the many ways in which they helped to improve it, and Marcin Trzęsiok of the Karol Szymanowski Academy of Music in Katowice, for wide discussions and for correcting my mistakes with Polish. For help with autograph sources: Grzegorz Kubacki of the Biblioteka Kórnicka, Piotr Maculewicz at the University of Warsaw Library Archive of Polish Composers, and Katya Kaiser at the Historical Archive, Universal Edition AG, Vienna. Research for this article was pursued during a period of sabbatical leave granted by Royal Holloway, University of London.
References
1 Broadly, this is the interpretation in Alistair Wightman, Karol Szymanowski: His Life and Work (Ashgate, 1999). Szymanowski considered Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy to be one of the ‘most beautiful books in the world’: Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, Spotkania z Szymanowskim (PWM, 1976), 29. See Dąbrowski, Bartosz, Mit dionizyjski Karola Szymanowskiego (Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego, 2001)Google Scholar. Szymanowski’s Dionysianism reflects his close association with Młoda Polska (Young Poland) aesthetics, which dominated the early, pre-war twentieth century: see Głowinski, Michał, ‘Maska Dionyizosa’, Młodapolski świat wyobraźni, ed. Podraza-Kwiatkowska, Maria (Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1977), 353–406 Google Scholar.
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16 See, for example, Micińska, Anna, Witkacy. Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz: Life and Work, trans. Piotrowska, Bogna (Interpress, 1990), 23–26 Google Scholar.
17 For an account, see Chylińska, Teresa, Karol Szymanowski i jego epoka, vol. 1 (Musica Iagellonica, 2008), 292–94Google Scholar. A collection of extracts from letters and reminiscences concerning the affair is translated in Wightman, Karol Szymanowski, 125–27.
18 See Chylińska, Karol Szymanowski i jego epoka, 425–26.
19 Letter of May or June 1917. From a draft version in the composer’s notebooks (emphasis in original); Chylińska, Teresa (ed.), Karol Szymanowski: Korespondencja 1 1903–1919 (PWM, 2nd enlarged and rev. edn, 2007), 565 Google Scholar. Translation from Alistair Wightman (ed. and trans.), Karol Szymanowski: Correspondence Vol. 1, 1902–1919 (Smashwords, 2016) <https://www.smashwords.com/extreader/read/622747/231/karol-szymanowski-correspondence-volume-1–1902–1919/334> (accessed 13 May 2024).
20 Chylińska, Teresa (ed.), Karol Szymanowski: Korespondencja 2 (1920–26) * do 1923 (PWM, 1994), 586 Google Scholar.
21 Chylińska, Teresa (ed.), Karol Szymanowski: Korespondencja 3 (1927–31) *** 1930, 1931 (Musica Iagellonica, 1997), 372 Google Scholar. A rich array of anecdotes concerning their squabbles in Zakopane is recounted in Jerzy Rytard, Wspomnienia o Karolu Szymanowskim (PWM, 1947).
22 There are other ‘Szymanowskis’. The early novel, 622 Upadki Bunga, czyli demoniczna kobieta (The 622 Downfalls of Bungo, or the Demonic Woman, 1910–11) includes the composers Bałwanow and Anodion, Pożegnanie jesieni (Farewell to Autumn, 1927) the musicians Azalin Pepudrech and Ziezio Smorski, and in Jedyne Wyjście (The Only Solution, incomplete, 1931–33) we encounter the pianist Roman Tępniak-Cyferblatowicz.
23 In Spengler’s words: ‘Thus there arise distorted forms, crystals whose inner structure contradicts their external shapes.’ Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West) (1918), trans. Charles Francis Atkinson (George Allen, 1980), 189. On Spengler and Witkiewicz, see Gerould, Daniel, Witkacy: Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz as an Imaginative Writer (University of Washington Press, 1981), 74 Google Scholar. Gerould’s work remains the most complete and authoritative study in English. On Spengler and Polish arts more broadly, see Agnieszka A. Marczyk, ‘Encounters at the Threshold of Modernity: The Self, Literary Innovation, and Polish Transition to Independence, 1905–1926’ (PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2011), 264–65.
24 Cited by Edward Boniecki, ‘The Lyrical, Young Poland “I” in Songs by Szymanowski to Words by Tadeusz Miciński’, in The Songs of Karol Szymanowski, ed. Helman and others, 11–23 (p. 16). ‘Pseudomorphism’ is also the term used by Daniel Albright for when an artistic medium is ‘asked’ to ‘do the work of’ another: ‘this typically involves a certain wrenching or scraping against the grain of the original medium’. Albright is, however, cautious about the word because of its negative application by Adorno (who also stole it from Spengler) in discussing Stravinsky. Albright, Daniel, Panaesthetics: On the Unity and Diversity of the Arts (Yale University Press, 2014) 141–48, 212Google Scholar; Theodor Adorno, ‘On Some Relationships between Music and Painting’ (1965), trans. Susan Gillespie, The Musical Quarterly, 79 (1995) 66–79 (p. 67).
25 Karol Szymanowski, ‘Fryderyk Chopin’, Skamander (1923), no. 28, 22–27, and no. 29/30, 106–10. Reprinted in Karol Szymanowski, Pisma 1: Pisma muzycyne, ed. Kornel Michałowski; revised and completed 2nd ed. by Teresa Chylińska (PWM, 2018), 90–103; Eng. trans. in Alistair Wightman (trans. and ed.), Szymanowski on Music (Toccata Press, 1999), 177–95.
26 Karol Szymanowski, ‘Z życia muzycznego w Paryżu’ (‘On the Musical Life of Paris’), Wiadomości Literackie, 29 and 30 (20 and 27 July 1924), in Szymanowski, Pisma 1, 118–26; trans. in Wightman (ed. and trans.), Szymanowski on Music, 228.
27 Juliusz Starzyński, ‘Szymanowski a problematyka plastyki Polskiej w XX-leciu międzywojennym’, Księga Sesji Naukowej póswięconej twórczości Karola Szymanowskiego (Warsaw 25–26 Marca 1962), ed. Zofia Lissa and Zofia Helman (PWM, 1964), 261–73, (pp. 267–69).
28 Skarbowski, Jerzy, ‘Stanisław I. Witkiewicz a muzyka: Witkiewicz a Szymanowski’, Muzyka 37/1 (1992), 41–51 Google Scholar.
29 On which, see Piotrowski, Piotr, ‘“Art in the Crucible of History”: Witkacy’s Theory and Practice of Painting’, The Polish Review, 33 (1988), 123–42Google Scholar, especially p. 139.
30 On Worringer and Witkiewicz, see Grzegorz Sztabiński, ‘Metaphysical Feeling and Image: Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz and his Esthetic Concept’, in Witkacy, Logos and the Elements, ed. Teresa Pękala, trans. Jerzy Adamko (Peter Lang, 2017), 171–95 (pp. 192–95).
31 Worringer, Wilhelm, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, trans. Bullock, Michael (Martino Publishing, 2014), 15, 35–45 Google Scholar.
32 Chwistek first published his ‘Wielość rzeczywistości w sztuce’ (Plural Reality in Art) in the magazine Maski, 1/1–4 (1918), and then as a book in 1921. Excerpts are translated in Timothy O. Benson and Éva Forgács (eds.), Between Worlds: A Sourcebook of Central European Avant-Gardes, 1910–1930 (MIT Press, 2002), 253–59; and Jean G. Harrell and Alina Wierzbiańska, Aesthetics in Twentieth-Century Poland: Selected Essays (Associated University Press, 1973), 66–97. Under the name ‘Formist’ (established by 1919), Polish artists combined and transformed tendencies from expressionism, cubism, and futurism. There were six issues of Formiści between 1919 and 1921, the first two included major statements from Chwistek, including, in the second, ‘Formism’, an exposition of the debts and differentiations from the European avant-garde. See Przemysław Strożek, ‘The Magazine Formiści and the Early International Contacts of the Polish Avant-Garde, 1919–1921’, trans. Kemp-Welch, Klara, A Reader in East-Central-European Modernism 1918–1956, ed. Hock, Beáta, Kemp-Welch, Klara, and Owen, Jonathan (The Courtauld Institute of Art, 2019), 126–38Google Scholar.
33 See Bartelik, Marek, Early Polish Modern Art: Unity in Multiplicity (Manchester University Press, 2005), 66–68 Google Scholar.
34 Sztabiński, ‘Metaphysical Feeling and Image’, 171–95.
35 Szymanowski, ‘Efebos’ (1919), Pisma 2; Pisma literackie, ed. Teresa Chylińska, 2nd edn., revised and completed (PWM, 2018), 129.
36 Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Szkice estetyczne (Spolka Wydawnicza, 1922).
37 Witkiewicz, Stanisław Ignacy, Nowe formy w malarstwie (Gebethner i Wolff, 1919)Google Scholar. Translated excerpts are available in Benson and Forgács (eds.), Between Worlds, 245–50; and Daniel Gerould (trans. and ed.), The Witkiewicz Reader (Quartet, 1993), 107–16.
38 Bartelik, Early Polish Modern Art, 57–91. On Polish expressionism and formalism, see also Mansbach, , Modern Art in Eastern Europe: From the Baltic to the Balkans c. 1890–1939 (Cambridge University Press, 1999), 96–108 Google Scholar.
39 Lecture given at the Mały theatre in Warsaw, 29 December 1921; published in Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Teatr (Krakowska Spółka Wydawnicza, 1923), 106–27. There is wide critical literature on Witkiewicz’s theatrical theory and practice. See, for example, Kiebuzinska, Christine, ‘Witkacy’s Theory of Pure Form: Change, Dissolution, and Uncertainty’, South Atlantic Review, 58 (1993), 59–83 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Degler, Janusz, ‘Witkacy’s Theory of Theatre’, Russian Literature, 22 (1987), 139–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schmidt, Anna, Form und Deformation: Zum kunsttheoretischen und dramatischen Werk von Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (Verlag Otto Sagner, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gelassi, Frank, ‘Sexual Politics in Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz’s The New Deliverance ’, The Polish Review, 18 (1973), 112–30Google Scholar. On relationships with Russian Formalism (Victor Shklovsky’s ostranenie) and alienation in Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, see Hyde, G. M., ‘The Word Unheard: Form in Modern Polish Drama’, Word and Image: A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry, 4 (1988), 719–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. pp. 722–24.
40 Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, ‘O “deformacji” na obrazach’, Gazeta Wieczorna (1920), trans. in Benson and Forgács (eds.), Between Worlds, 251–52.
41 Witkiewicz’s paintings are widely reproduced; for example, see Jakimowicz, Irena, Witkacy the Painter (Wydawnictwa artystyczne i filmowe Warszawa, 1987)Google Scholar.
42 See Henderson, Linda Dalrymple, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidian Geometry in Modern Art, rev. edn (MIT Press, 2013)Google Scholar. In the section ‘Form and Actuality’ in volume 1 of The Decline of the West, Spengler writes of the ‘non-Euclidian’ nature of experiential depth in music and lyric poetry as contrasted with the perspectival depth of Renaissance painting.
43 Gerould, Witkacy, 77.
44 A translation of the play text is available in Gerould (trans. and ed.), The Witkiewicz Reader, 125–42. Critical discussion can be found in Gerould, Witkacy, 100–14, to which my summary is indebted.
45 Witkiewicz, Stanisław Ignacy, ‘The Madman and the Nun’ and ‘The Crazy Locomotive’: Three Plays (including ‘The Water Hen’), ed., trans. and with intro. by Gerould, Daniel and Durer, C. S. (Applause, 1989)Google Scholar.
46 For a short comparison, see Paul Cadrin, ‘Form’, in The Szymanowski Companion, ed. Downes and Cadrin, 94–99.
47 Skarbowski, ‘Stanisław I. Witkiewicz a muzyka’.
48 Szymanowski, ‘Fryderyk Chopin’.
49 Witkiewicz, O czystej formie, 10.
50 Wagner, Richard, Beethoven, trans. Ellis, William Ashton (Dodo Press, 2008), 7–15 Google Scholar.
51 In 1902, Witkiewicz wrote an essay ‘Filozofia Schopenhauera i jego stosunek do poprzedników’ (‘Schopenhauer’s Philosophy and his Relation to his Predecessors’). On the importance of Schopenhauer in Szymanowski’s early work, see Stephen Downes, Szymanowski, Eroticism and the Voices of Mythology, RMA Monograph 11 (Ashgate, 2003), 19–37.
52 For a useful summary, see Ferrara, Lawrence, ‘Schopenhauer on Music as the Embodiment of Will’, Schopenhauer, Philosophy, and the Arts, ed. Jacquette, Dale (Cambridge University Press, 2010), 183–99Google Scholar.
53 Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, ‘O dualizmie’ (‘On Dualism’) (1902), trans. in Gould (trans. and ed.), Witkiewicz Reader, 47–49.
54 Sokół, Lech, ‘Muzyka jako Sztuka Czysta: Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz i Konstantin Regamey’, Przestrzenie Teorii, 14 (2010), 33–84 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
55 ‘O Hanslicku i jego Estetyce’, unpublished fragment; in Szymanowski, Pisma 1, 508–09.
56 ‘Któż dziś poda w wątpliwość, iż jedyną glebą, na której może wyróść prawdziwa sztuka, a więc i wielkie dzieło muzyczne, jest najbardziej głębokie i tajemnicze “paniczne” ludzkie wzruszenie wobec samego faktu istnienia?’ ‘Romantyzm w dobie współczesnej’, Muzyka 5/7–9 (1928); repr. in Szymanowski, Pisma 1, 243–44.
57 Ibid., 245 n. 6.
58 Witkiewicz, O czystej formie, 16.
59 Ibid., 21; this passage trans. from Harrell, Jean G. and Wierzbiańska, Alina, Aesthetics in Twentieth-Century Poland; Selected Essays (Associated University Press, 1973), 41–65 Google Scholar (p. 55).
60 Witkiewicz, Szkice estetyczne, 108–09, trans. in Benson and Forgács (eds.), Between Worlds, 261–64.
61 Witkiewicz, 622 Upadki Bunga, czyli demoniczna kobieta, trans. in Gerould (trans. and ed.), Witkiewicz Reader, 69.
62 On the late nineteenth-century rise of Zakopane, see Crowley, David, ‘Finding Poland in the Margins: The Case of the Zakopane Style’, Journal of Design History, 14 (2001), 105–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
63 Witkiewicz, Stanisław Ignacy, Beelzebub Sonata: Plays, Essays, Documents, ed. and trans. Gerould, Daniel and Kosicka, Jadwiga (Performing Arts Journals Publications, 1980), 26, 31, 41Google Scholar. Which sonata might be Witkiewicz’s possible model? The play has a misquotation from Beethoven as its epigraph, ‘Musik ist höhere Offenbarung als jede Religion und Philosophie’, so could it be the ‘Tempest’ Sonata, op. 31 (given the relationship of the play to Strindberg’s The Ghost Sonata). Alternatively, because the key is said to be F♯ minor, Gerould suggests Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet, op. 10 (1908); Gerould, Witkacy, 256. Christine Kiebuzińska, however, goes for Szymanowski’s Second Piano Sonata; ‘Witkacy and Ghelderode: Goethe’s Faust Transformed into a Grotesque Cabaret’, Estetyka i Krytyka: The Polish Journal of Aesthetics, 31 (2012), 207–20 (p. 213); repr. in Witkacy: 21st Century Perspectives, ed. Kevin Anthony Hayes and Mark Rudnicki (The Witkacy Convention and Heritage Company, 2014), 207–20 (p. 213).
64 Witkiewicz, Insatiability, trans. Louis Iribarne, with an introduction by Czesław Miłosz (Quartet, 1985), 38, 45, 50, 54.
65 Further resonances can be identified between Witkiewicz’s ‘op. 13’ and Szymanowski’s op. 14, but the point of comparison is sufficiently made.
66 Bocheński, Tomasz, ‘Kompozycje muzyczne Witkacego’, Teksty, 4 (2000), 159–66Google Scholar.
67 There are several compositions of his stretching from the war years and into the early 1940s, but his settings of Młoda Polska poetry, for example, are considered by Bocheński to be those of an eccentric epigone.
68 Skarbowski, ‘Stanisław I. Witkiewicz a muzyka’, 42.
69 Letter to Stefan Speiss, 30 July/12 August 1917: ‘I wrote a sonata, I am very curious what you will say about it – I have a few more things on the agenda: songs with an orchestra and maybe a small quartet’; Chylińska (ed.),Korespondencja 1, 576.
70 Józef Chomiński, ‘Fortepianowa twórczość Szymanowskiego’ (‘Karol Szymanowski’s Works for Piano’), Muzyka Polska 5 (1936), repr. in Studia nad twórczością Karola Szymanowskiego (PWM, 1969), 165–79.
71 Similar issues pervade the Second Symphony, op. 19 (1910–11), which on its premiere gleaned positive critical judgement concerning Szymanowski’s manipulation of musical form. Reviews by the influential Henryk Opieński and Aleksander Poliński both commented on the symphony’s formal originality. The symphony’s overriding characteristic is developmental continuity through almost relentless contrapuntal complexity. On these reviews see Wightman, Karol Szymanowski, 85–87. It is also characteristic of the First Symphony op. 15 (1906–07): see Stefan Keym, ‘“A Contrapuntal-Harmonic-Orchestral Monster”? Karol Szymanowski’s First Symphony in the Context of the Polish and German Symphonic Tradition’, Musicology Today (2008), 5–25.
72 Letter of 2 November 1911; Chylińska (ed.), Korespondencja 1, 305; trans. in Wightman, Correspondence, vol. 1, 156–57. Samson hears the first movement of the Second Symphony as built around two climactic highpoints, the first in the development, the second in the coda; The Music of Szymanowski, 58. Wightman’s formal reading of the First Violin Concerto is also built around its series of graded climaxes; Wightman, Karol Szymanowski, 181.
73 On these aspects of the Second Piano Sonata, see Stephen Downes, ‘Revitalising Sonata Form: Structure and Climax in Szymanowski’s Op. 21’, in After Chopin: Essays on Polish Music, ed. Maja Trochimczyk (Polish Music Center at USC, 2000), 111–41. As Leonard B. Meyer noted, romantic music’s increasing emphasis on ‘statistical climax’ (generated by processes of textural, dynamic, and/or rhythmic intensification) led to a reinterpretation or undermining of the syntactical and formal obligations of the sonata design: Style and Music: Theory, History and Ideology (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989). This might also be heard to perpetuate the characteristic romantic formal strategy of the recapitulation building to a redemptive transfiguration of the ‘feminine’ second subject. See, for example, Hepokoski, James, ‘Masculine-Feminine’, The Musical Times, 135, no. 1818 (August 1994), 494–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Theoretical consideration of Szymanowski’s works in the light of Hepokoski, James and Darcy’s, Warren Elements of Sonata Theory: Norms, Types, and Deformations in the late Eighteenth-Century Sonata (Oxford University Press, 2011)Google Scholar lies outside the scope of this article.
74 Józef Chomiński, ‘Szymanowski i muzyka europejska XX w’ (1962), in Studia, 1–11, trans. in Zdzisław Sierpiński (ed.), Karol Szymanowski: An Anthology, trans. Emma Harris (Interpress, 1986) 1–12.
75 Tadeusz Andrzej Zieliński, Szymanowski: lyrika i ekstaza (PWM, 1997), 140.
76 Samson, The Music of Szymanowski, 110. Wightman describes the first movement as an ‘abridged sonata form’ with no ‘self-contained’ development section, as this is made ‘redundant’ by the pervasively developmental character of the material, Karol Szymanowski, 200–1.
77 Zieliński, Szymanowski: lyrika i ekstaza, 140
78 Wightman, Szymanowski, 193–95.
79 Samson, The Music of Szymanowski, 108, 110.
80 Helman interprets the opening paragraph as a three-part design, The History of Music in Poland, 320. Horatio Antonio Cruz-Perez describes Szymanowski ‘rethinking of sonata form’ through ‘the recasting of the tonal structure, in which the conventional dialectic between two related keys is replaced by one where tonal opposition is nearly absent’, an absence compensated by motivic and rhythmic contrasts. Cruz-Perez’s analysis splits my first presentation of the opening theme into two statements (bb.1–12 and 13–23) on the basis of a shift between the two whole-tone collections. From bar 25 he proposes a ‘contrasting theme’; but as he notes, it shares motives, melodic, and harmonic aspects of the preceding bars. Only the tempo and texture is contrasted. Overall, Cruz-Perez considers what I call the first subject area to be a rondo-like form: A theme (twice): B textural contrasting theme (from b. 25): A theme returns (from b. 36): C developmental contrast (from b. 50). Horatio Antonio Cruz-Perez, ‘The Piano Sonatas of Karol Szymanowski’ (PhD dissertation, Northwestern University, 1987), 202–07. It is therefore a reading based on hearing greater contrast in thematic content than in mine.
81 For specific comparisons with thematic characters in Szymanowski’s earlier works, see van Moere, Karol Szymanowski, 240.
82 Helman, History of Music in Poland, 320, 323.
83 Daniel W. Pratt, ‘Aesthetic Selves: Non-narrative Constructions of Identity in Central Europe’, (PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 2014), 3. On wider manifestations of this crisis, see Klein, Michael L., Music and the Crises of the Modern Subject (Indiana University Press, 2015)Google Scholar.
84 Marczyk, ‘Encounters at the Threshold of Modernity’, 11, 17, 208–09, 220.
85 See, for example, Schmalfeldt, Janet, In the Process of Becoming: Analytic and Philosophical Perspectives on Form in Early Nineteenth-Century Music (Oxford University Press, 2011)Google Scholar and the now classic text, Scott Burnham, Beethoven Hero (Princeton University Press, 1995). This is, of course, a partial view of Beethoven’s forms.
86 See Helman, The History of Polish Music, 323, and Chwiłek, Agnieszka, ‘Struktura i funkcja fugi z cyklu sonatowego w twórczości Karola Szymanowskiego’, Muzyka, 42 (1997), 55–78 Google Scholar, esp. pp. 67–74 where she discusses the sonata as exemplifying her second type of synthesizing finale, the integration of motive and tonality across a multipart form, ‘maximalized’ in the fugue.
87 Chylińska, Szymanowski, 120.
88 Wightman, Karol Szymanowski, 200–1.
89 Van Moere, Karol Szymanowski, 239.
90 As discussed, with other examples, but none by Szymanowski or Witkiewicz, in Greenberg, Yoel, ‘“Ordo ab chao”: The Fugue as Chaos in the early Twentieth Century’, Music & Letters, 99 (2018), 74–103 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
91 Konstanty Regamey, ‘Piątkowy koncert symfoniczny. Pierwsze wykonanie IV symfonii Szymanowskiego’, Zet, 16 (1932), 6. Cited and discussed in Naliwajek, Katarzyna, ‘Konstanty Regamey jako kontinuator idei Karola Szymanowskiego’, in Szymanowski w perspektywie kultury muzycznej przeszłości i współczesności, ed. Skowron, Zbigniew (Musica Iagellonica, 2007), 289–307 Google Scholar (p. 292). On the relationship of Regamey and Szymanowski in the discourses of Polish modernism in the 1930s, see also Vest, Lisa Cooper, Awangarda: Tradition and Modernity in Post-War Polish Music (University of California Press, 2021), 11–19 Google Scholar.
92 Stanisław I. Witkiewicz, O czystej formie (Zet, 1921); Regamey’s ‘Treść i forma w muzyce’ is reprinted in Regamey, Konstanty, Wybór Pism Estetycznych, ed. Naliwajek-Mazurek, Katarzyna (Universitas, 2010), 4–50 Google Scholar. Regamey wrote a post-war appreciation: ‘Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (1885–1939)’, Pamiętnik Literacki, 7 (1946), 9–20. An important interlocutor between Regamey and Witkiewicz (and to a lesser degree Szymanowski, whom he knew less well) was the essayist Bolesław Miciński. He outlined an interesting critical comparison of Witkiewicz and Szymanowski in notes written during 1941–42 (he died in 1943); see Stanisław I. Miciński, Pisma Zebrane 1: Podróże do Piekieł (Biblioteka Więzi, 2011), 230–37. Sokół offers a lengthy comparison of Regamey, Witkiewicz, and the role of Miciński in his ‘Muzyka jako Sztuka Czysta’, a discussion which in part builds on the essays collected in K. Tarnawska-Kaczorowska (ed.), Oblicza polistylizmu. Materiały sympozjum poświęconego twórczości Konstantego Regameya. Warszawa, 29–30 maja 1987 (Sekcja Muzykologów Związku Kompozytorów Polskich, 1988).
93 Konstanty Regamey, ‘Twórczość Szymanowskiego’, Prosto z mostu, 17 (11 April 1937). The same views are reworked in ‘Stanowisko Szymanowskiego w muzyce europejskiej’, Ateneum 2 (1938), 1–15, repr. in Regamey, Wybór Pism Estetycznych, 248–62, esp. p. 255.
94 Regamey, ‘Stanowisko Szymanowskiego’, 260. The question of Regamey’s understanding of neoclassicism is too large to address here; see, for example, his essay ‘Neoklasycyzm a romantyzm’, Ruch Muzyczny, nos. 15–16 (1947), 2–6, repr. in Wybór Pism Estetycznych, 107–17. For a summary evaluation see Helman, Neoklasycyzm w muzyce polskiej, 58, 197–98.
95 Piotr Rytel, Gazeta Warszawska, 16 April 1924.
96 Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, ‘Kącik Szymanowskiego’, Wiadomości Literackie, 23 March 1924, 2.
97 Zieliński, Szymanowski: lyrika i ekstaza, 148–49.
98 See Paul Cadrin, ‘Music about Music: The First String Quartet, Op. 37, in C, by Karol Szymanowski’, Canadian University Music Review/Revue de musique des universités canadiennes, 7 (1986), 171–87.
99 Wightman describes the development as ‘Dionysian’ in its ‘rapid movement through a wide range of moods, from subdued to weird and fantastical.’ Wightman, Karol Szymanowski, 202.
100 Thomas, Polish Music since Szymanowski, 5.
101 For a useful survey of definitions, see John D. Jump, Burlesque (Methuen, 1972), 1–2.
102 See, for example, Haney, Joel, ‘Slaying the Wagnerian Monster: Hindemith, Das Nusch-Nuschi and Musical Germanness after the Great War’, The Journal of Musicology, 25 (2008), 339–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
103 See, for example, Hatten, Robert, ‘Interpreting Expression: The Adagio Sostenuto from Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in Bb op. 106 (“Hammerklavier”)’, Theory and Practice, 19 (1994), 1–17 Google Scholar, esp. p. 6.
104 See Downes, Szymanowski, Eroticism, and the Voices of Mythology, 22–36.
105 ‘Tymoszówka’, Wiadomości literacki 1939 (no. 34). Vladimir Jankélévitch identifies Szymanowski’s ‘Tantris’, alongside examples by Prokofiev and Tansman, with a ‘sarcastic Burla’, that part of the ‘modernist Burla’ which ‘seeks buffoonery’ and in which clowning displaces the devilish ‘bizarre’ burlesque of the romantics. In these burlesque pieces he hears not only anti-romanticism but also anti-impressionism: ‘sharp pizzicati that prick pinholes in the gently shaded-off mist of musical impressionism, just as Picasso’s angular lines and wicked dots prick the vagueness, the subtle gradation of colour and the cottony fog that drowns Monet’s countryside or Carrière’s portraits.’ The music’s ‘dry jabs’ create a version of ‘pointillism’, with emphasis on the ‘discontinuous instant’. Jankélévitch, Vladimir, Music and the Ineffable, trans. Abbate, Carolyn (Princeton University Press, 2003), 44 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
106 Hoffman, Paul S. and McCullough, Jack W., ‘Visual Images in Witkiewicz: They in Production’, The Polish Review, 18, 1/2 (1973), 52–57 Google Scholar. In Oni (‘They’, 1920) burlesque elements are identified with the comic, but these are juxtaposed with elements of ‘menace’ and extreme ‘sensuousness’.
107 Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, ‘Wstęp do teorji czystej formy w teatrze’ (1919) (‘An introduction to the theory of Pure Form in Theatre’), in Witkiewicz, Teatr, 49–50.
108 ‘O “deformacji” na obrazach’, Gazeta Wieczorna (1920), trans. in Benson and Forgács (eds.), Between Worlds, 251–52.
109 Their influence on Chomiński is noted previously. When, in the mid-1920s, Szymanowski attempted to write a book on the ‘new music’, he was greatly influenced by Mersmann’s Musik der Gegenwart (1924), a copy of which he borrowed from the Polish musicologist Adolf Chybiński. Szymanowski’s comments on form in his notes for this project are imbued with metaphors of force, energy, and space. In this regard they not only reveal the debt to Mersmann but also the sustained importance of Witkiewicz’s contemporaneous writings on painting and theatre. Szymanowski was no doubt in strong part impressed with Mersmann’s book because it included an example from his own Pieśni muezina szalonego (‘Songs of an Infatuated Muezzin’, op. 42, 1918), whose vocal arabesques are compared and contrasted with the melodic writing in Schoenberg’s setting of Maeterlinck’s Herzgewächse, op. 20: see Mersmann, Hans, Musik der Gegenwart (Julius Bard, 1924), 71–72 Google Scholar.
110 Letter of 11/24 July 1917; Chylińska (ed.), Korespondencja 1, 573.
111 Cadrin, ‘Music about Music’.
112 Jachimecki, Karol Szymanowski: Rys dotychczasowej twórczości (PWM, 1927).
113 Cadrin, ‘Music about Music’.
114 Cited in Naliwajek, ‘Konstanty Regamey’, 292, n. 8.
115 Wightman, Karol Szymanowski, 241.
116 Zofia Helman, ‘Incidental Music’,in Szymanowski Companion, ed. Downes and Cadrin, 118.
117 Szymanowski, ‘Igor Strawińsky’ (1921), Pisma 1, 47–54 (pp. 51–2). It is not clear when Szymanowski would have known Stravinsky’s Three Pieces for String Quartet (composed in 1915), which have passages whose extensions of techniques found in Petrushka come close to effects heard in the burlesque section of Szymanowski’s quartet. Szymanowski met Stravinsky in 1914, but the war made further contact impossible until the 1920s.
118 ‘Igor Strawińsky’, 51–3.
119 ‘Karol Szymanowski o muzyce współczesnej’ (‘Karol Szymanowski on Contemporary Music’), Kurier Polski, 12 November 1922. Pisma 1, 59; trans. in Szymanowski on Music, 199–200.
120 Agnieszka Chwiłek, ‘Kilka uwag o formie muzycznej w refleksji estetycznej i praktyce kompozytorskiej Karola Szymanowskiego’, in Karol Szymanowski w perspektywie, 121–33 (p.125).
121 Szymanowski, ‘Igor Strawiński’, 51.
122 A comparative analysis would require a separate article.
123 Szymanowski, ‘Fryderyk Chopin’, Pisma 1, 96–97, in Szymanowski on Music, trans. and ed. Wightman, 192.
124 See Downes, Stephen, ‘Eros and Paneuropeanism: Szymanowski’s Utopian Vision’, in Musical Constructions of Nationalism: Essays on the History and Ideology of European Musical Culture 1800–1945, ed. White, Harry and Murphy, Michael (Cork University Press, 2001), 51–71 Google Scholar; ‘Cultural Affiliations and National Filiations: Textuality and History in Edward Said’s “Secular Criticism and Szymanowski’s Poetics of “Paneuropeanism”’, Karol Szymanowski w perspektywie kultury muzycznej przeszłości i współczesności, 93–104.
125 Szymanowski, ‘Wychowawcza rola kultury muzycznej w społeczeństwie’ (‘The Educational Role of Musical Culture in Society’), Pamiętnik Warszawski (November 1930); Pisma 1, 275–303, in Szymanowski on Music, trans. and ed. Wightman, 281–307.
126 Miciński, Pisma Zebrane 1, 235.
127 Szymanowski, ‘Igor Strawińsky’, Warszawianka, 1 November 1924; Pisma 1, 142-3, in Szymanowski on Music, trans. and ed. Wightman, 223.
128 This parallel is suggested by Gerould, Witkacy, 254.