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drplaceboIt's Forgotten Masterpiece Friday!
For a brief moment, Mieczysław Karłowicz (1876-1909) stood alongside Mahler and Richard Strauss as one of the leading composers in the transition from Romanticism to modernism. It was, however, only a moment: Karłowicz's life was tragically cut short just as he was beginning to achieve recognition as a great composer.
Karłowicz's career as a composer began relatively late. He was a promising violinist in his teens, but did not compose his first piece until he was 17 or 18. In 1895, he traveled to Berlin intending to study violin with Joseph Joachim, but after being turned down, he instead enrolled at the University of Berlin as a student of musical composition. He produced his two largest-scale pieces, a symphony and a violin concerto, at the end of his student years; these were his last pieces in traditional forms. Much like Richard Strauss, he came to favor the genre of the symphonic poem, and indeed composed in no other form after he completed his studies. After graduating from the University of Berlin in 1901, Karłowicz returned to Warsaw only to find audiences and critics vehemently opposed to his post-Romantic style. Within a few years, thoroughly frustrated, he moved to the resort town of Zakopane in the Tatra Mountains. He became an avid mountain climber and skier as well as a noted landscape photographer, while continuing to compose.
Eventually he began to gain some recognition as a composer, and 1908 and 1909 saw a whole string of premieres of pieces he had composed over the past decade. He began to draw favorable comparisons to Strauss, Mahler, and Scriabin. He did not enjoy the recognition for long, however: he perished in an avalanche in early February 1909 while skiing just outside Zakopane.
The symphonic tryptich Eternal Songs, though one of his earlier symphonic poems, was Karłowicz's last piece published during his lifetime, with the composer agreeing to terms with a publisher less than a month before his untimely death. Though the three "songs" are not expressly programmatic, the piece was intended as a synthesis of Karłowicz's pantheistic spirituality. The composer described his inspiration thus: "When I find myself alone on a precipitious summit ... then I begin to dissolve into the surrounding spaces, I cease to feel like a separate individual, and am covered by the powerful, everlasting breath of eternity. ... Hours experienced in this half-conscious state are, so to say, a momentary return to non-existence; they give peace in the face of life and death, they tell of the eternal hope of dissolution in the universe."
Movements:
I. Song of Everlasting Yearning
II. Song of Love and Death (10:45)
III. Song of Eternal Being (21:26)
For a brief moment, Mieczysław Karłowicz (1876-1909) stood alongside Mahler and Richard Strauss as one of the leading composers in the transition from Romanticism to modernism. It was, however, only a moment: Karłowicz's life was tragically cut short just as he was beginning to achieve recognition as a great composer.
Karłowicz's career as a composer began relatively late. He was a promising violinist in his teens, but did not compose his first piece until he was 17 or 18. In 1895, he traveled to Berlin intending to study violin with Joseph Joachim, but after being turned down, he instead enrolled at the University of Berlin as a student of musical composition. He produced his two largest-scale pieces, a symphony and a violin concerto, at the end of his student years; these were his last pieces in traditional forms. Much like Richard Strauss, he came to favor the genre of the symphonic poem, and indeed composed in no other form after he completed his studies. After graduating from the University of Berlin in 1901, Karłowicz returned to Warsaw only to find audiences and critics vehemently opposed to his post-Romantic style. Within a few years, thoroughly frustrated, he moved to the resort town of Zakopane in the Tatra Mountains. He became an avid mountain climber and skier as well as a noted landscape photographer, while continuing to compose.
Eventually he began to gain some recognition as a composer, and 1908 and 1909 saw a whole string of premieres of pieces he had composed over the past decade. He began to draw favorable comparisons to Strauss, Mahler, and Scriabin. He did not enjoy the recognition for long, however: he perished in an avalanche in early February 1909 while skiing just outside Zakopane.
The symphonic tryptich Eternal Songs, though one of his earlier symphonic poems, was Karłowicz's last piece published during his lifetime, with the composer agreeing to terms with a publisher less than a month before his untimely death. Though the three "songs" are not expressly programmatic, the piece was intended as a synthesis of Karłowicz's pantheistic spirituality. The composer described his inspiration thus: "When I find myself alone on a precipitious summit ... then I begin to dissolve into the surrounding spaces, I cease to feel like a separate individual, and am covered by the powerful, everlasting breath of eternity. ... Hours experienced in this half-conscious state are, so to say, a momentary return to non-existence; they give peace in the face of life and death, they tell of the eternal hope of dissolution in the universe."
Movements:
I. Song of Everlasting Yearning
II. Song of Love and Death (10:45)
III. Song of Eternal Being (21:26)
(no subject)
Date: 2019-01-12 01:00 pm (UTC)I like his description of his inspiration. I feel that when I rock climb.