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Donald Macleod traces Szymanowski's passion for the music of Richard Strauss to his student years in Warsaw.

The reshaping of Europe at the end of the First World War had a defining effect on Karol Szymanowski. As Europe was being reapportioned, the comfortable world he’d known up to that point vanished for good. His family’s comfortable and cultured life disappeared, their assets wiped out by the October Revolution. From that point on, Szymanowski ceased to be a man of some privilege, able to compose in the relative seclusion of his family’s estate in what was then part of Ukraine. He needed to support himself and his mother and sisters but he found himself ill-equipped temperamentally to deal with this dramatic change in his lifestyle. He became increasingly weighed down by illness, quite probably tuberculosis. That, coupled with a chain smoking habit and struggles with alcoholism, were to take their toll. He died in poverty at the age of just 54 in 1937.

Across the week, Donald Macleod explores five distinct influences on Szymanowski’s music, starting with his formative years growing up in a family with a passion for the arts. As a young student, his studies in Warsaw led him towards the language of Richard Strauss and Max Reger, while his love of travel directed him towards impressionism, the ancient world and the Orient. Meeting Stravinsky in Paris and hearing the Ballets Russes was another turning point, as was in his later years in particular, his commitment to establishing a national musical voice for the newly formed country of Poland.

Szymanowki's interest in German culture stemmed from childhood lessons with his uncle Gustav Neuhaus, who introduced his young nephew to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. On his arrival as a young man in Warsaw this immersion into German art forms took on a musical shape as it began to percolate into his own compositions.

Mazurka, Op 50 No 11
Roland Pontinen, piano

Desires; The infatuated east wind; Dance (Love Songs of Hafiz, Op 26)
Ryszard Minkiewicz, tenor
Orchestra of the Polish National Opera
Robert Satanowski, conductor

Concert Overture in E major, Op 12
³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Symphony Orchestra
Edward Gardner, conductor

Piano Sonata No 2 in A major, Op 21 (2nd movement)
Martin Roscoe, piano

Symphony No 2 in B flat, Op 19 (1st movement)
London Philharmonic Orchestra
Leon Botstein, conductor