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The Music at Tippet Rise
KAROL SZYMANOWSKI (1882–1937) Mythes, Op. 30
Despite being rejected by the conservative musical elite, even though he was briefly director of the Warsaw Conservatory, Karol Szymanowski later became the most celebrated Polish composer of the early 20th century, thanks to a determined crusade by his friends, such as
the pianist Arthur Rubinstein and the composer Witold Lutosławski. After the Conservatory was shut down by the government in 1930, he moved to the Villa Atma (“Soul” in Sanskrit), now the Szymanowski Museum, a beautiful wooden mountain chalet in Zakopane, a ski resort at the foot of the Tatra Mountains.
He was determined to create a Polish national voice by adapting the folk songs of his native Carpathian Moun- tains before he died of tuberculosis seven years later. Even in 1915, in the thick of the First World War, he felt that he had begun this voice in Mythes.
As would happen to Rachmaninoff, the Bolsheviks would in three years, in 1918, destroy Szymanowski’s family estate in the Ukraine, where he composed Mythes. The piano would be thrown in the lake. His youth, his gestation period, would be over. His country and his home taken from him, like Rachmaninoff, like Mann, like Nabokov, he set out to create a new one out of art. But he was dying of tuberculosis. He didn’t have much time.
Mythes is a sonata, with the usual fast-slow-fast movements, with a descriptive program involving various kinds of water imagery. Programmatic music had been forsaken by the Romantics, but Wagner, and on the other side of the hill, Stravinsky, had continued its traditions. The piece evolved out of his travels to the port of Syracuse on Sicily, the source of Arethusa’s spring.
In “The Fountain of Arethusa,” the nymph Arethusa is turned into a spring by the god Artemis to save her from
the advances of the river god Alpheus. Like Liszt’s Les jeux d’eau à la Villa d’Este, water frames Arethusa anxiously, cascading down a mountain stream on the piano, over which the nymph’s descending chromatic torch song vibrates on the violin’s high E string.
You can hear the chase of Alpheus in the frenetic midsection, until only Arethusa’s song remains, all tremolos and glissandi, where the finger sweeps up the violin neck. In the second movement, “Narcissus,” a beautiful young man falls in love with himself and drowns in his own reflection in the still water. Water swirls around him, although less frantically than it does Arethusa. This is a cantilena, a song for the violin, with meditative glissandi and chromaticism.
In the third movement, “Dryads and Pan,” the violin imitates the thousand voices of the trees, the murmur of insects, the hot summer night, the wind in the leaves. And Dryads dancing. Szymanowski achieves his exoticism by layering keys over each other, by mixing in Debussy, Ravel, late Scriabin, and eastern Mediterranean and Asian harmonies until he creates his own eclectic style.
Pan’s eerie flute creates a sudden calm, after which the night insects buzz, and the wild dance resumes, but calms down in the sunrise like the smiles of a summer night. The violin (masquerading as the flute) uses two-note trills, tremolos, glissandi, left-hand pizzicatos and quarter tones, before dying away over the deep trembling of the piano.
The universal lattice of myth bears witness above to the antics of its characters—gods, dryads, nymphs, and narcissists—and in the end, the deep river winds on. In my end is my beginning.