Looking back on his lifetime, Karol Szymanowski, an outstanding Polish composer of the early twentieth century, said in an interview soon after his fiftieth birthday, “I was born and raised in Ukraine, I felt it deep in my heart, I liked its genial climate, its tempestuousness and sweetness.” This admission looks quite sincere when you leaf through Szymanowski’s letters and come across frequent nostalgic notes — especially when the composer was in favorable creative conditions or, conversely, when there were no such conditions, and he was looking back to the serene days he spent in his family estate Tymoszowka (now Tymoshivka) and those of his relatives, friends, and acquaintances: Zaruddia, Ryzhavka, and Dakhnivka. It is here that one could, as he put it, “revel in inspiration, the only valuable thing.”
Indeed, Szymanowski’s idea of Ukraine was, above all, “genial climate, tempestuousness, and sweetness.” But it was also a place where Eastern and Western European cultures met the antiquity and the Muslim world which he liked so much. In a tiny house on the bank of the Tymoshiv pond, basking in the rays of the Ukrainian sun, the composer wove the exquisite lace of such melodies as Love Songs of Hafiz and Songs of a Fairy-Tale Princess under the deep impression of his travels across North Africa, Greece, and Italy, particularly, Sicily. Oriental tunes merged with the songs of Ukrainian girls who sounded somewhat “wild and witchlike” (Zofia Szymanowska) and turned into capriciously gracious, ecstatically elated, and erotically enchanting musical scenes and pictures of Scheherazade, The Island of Sirens, and The Fountain of Arethusa.
The magic of the Ukrainian landscape and climate would not perhaps have cast such a spell on Szymanowski had there not been a stream of Ukrainian blood in his complicated ethnogenetic formation. This stream originated from his great-great-grandmother Franciszka, nee Rosciszewska, whose great-grandfather had married the Ukrainian noblewoman Tysziw-Bykowska. Franciszka’s sister Jozefa Rosciszewska was the great-great-grandmother of Tadeusz Rylski — so [Ukrainian poet] Maksym Rylsky was a distant relative of Szymanowski’s.
On the other hand, Szymanowski was also related to Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz, a true singer of Ukraine in twentieth-century Polish literature, to Felix Blumenfeld, a music conductor, composer, and pedagogue, the “wonder Felix” (V. Stasov) of Russian music at the turn of the twentieth century, and to Heinrich Neuhaus, a prominent Soviet-time pianist, professor at the Kyiv and Moscow conservatories.
These family ties were bound in what was then called Yelisavethrad (now Kirovohrad — Ed.), the Szymanowskis’ “winter capital,” where they owned a house with a garden that spread as far as the river Inhul. Young Karol was taught music by Gustav Neuhaus, Heinrich’s son, and was awarded a general education certificate by a local state-run secondary school — the school attended by the Tobileviches a few years before and, a little later, by Yevhen Malaniuk, Oleksandr Osmerkin, and Yury Yanovsky.
Paradoxically, all these outstanding artists went to a technically-biased educational institution, which this school was, while the future physicist Igor Tamm and rocket-builder Georgy Langemak received education at a nearby boys’ grammar school. True, the latter also had such pupils as Volodymyr Vynnychenko, Julius Meitus, Arseny Tarkovsky, Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz, and a less known Polish writer Michal Choromanski born in Yelisavethrad.
A small “wonderful Ukrainian city smothered in parks and flowering gardens” (Choromanski), which produced a brilliant constellation of Ukrainian, Russian, and Polish cultural figures, suddenly became, following the 1917 revolutions, a sort of prison for Szymanowski. Once the composer recovered from the prostration caused, in his own words, by “the nightmarish orgy of ruination and blood,” he staged a concert together with the local violinist Viktor Goldfeld, for whom he had written Three Paganini Caprices, one of his best oeuvres.
Extremely distressed over forced separation from Europe’s largest cultural centers, where he had been climbing the steps of his career as a composer for the past ten or fifteen years, the author of The Song of the Night mostly lived off the baggage of his Mediterranean travels. It is clear from his vocal cycles Songs to the Words of Rabindranath Tagore and Songs of the Infatuated Muezzin composed in Yelisavethrad. What inspired Szymanowski to create these pieces was a few weeks’ sojourn near Odesa at the country house of Lev and Marina Davydov, where he met Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz who had brought the composer a translation of Tagore’s poems and his own Songs of a Muezzin he wrote on the way from Kyiv to Odesa.
Looking back on the days he spent in Odesa’s Middle Fountain, Szymanowski wrote about a fabulous sea that made him long for his dream countries “on the far-away shores of genuine Southern seas... in Taormina or Palermo..., where all those beautiful phantoms are still lingering.”
At the same time, Szymanowski wrote the philosophical novel Ephebos and articles for Yelisavethrad-based newspapers, performed in a number of charity concerts, and sometimes even patrollea the streets at night with a rifle in hand. These dramatic episodes complete a 37-year-long Ukrainian period in the composer’s life. He caught perhaps the last train to flee from the Bolsheviks whom he called “liars and hypocrites.”
It is quite easy to imagine what was in store for the author of such phrases printed in the anticommunist newspaper Voyna i mir [War and peace].
In a new Poland which regained its independence after 123 years of enslavement, Szymanowski became an indisputable leader of musical life and plunged into the struggle for asserting national and, at the same time, modern art. He would always remember Ukraine as a country of the past, the country of an unwritten autobiographical story. Had he written one, we could perhaps find in it a confirmation of Ostap Lysenko’s reminiscences about a meeting between his father, an already well-known composer whose family spent the summer of 1892 at his brother Andriy’s place at the village Orlova Balka near Znamianka, and the Szymanowski family who also owned an estate at the same village. When Mykola Lysenko heard a few pieces performed by the nine-year-old Karol, he allegedly hugged him and said prophetically, “You are going to be a great composer.”
Given Szymanowski’s uncommon literary gift, he might have told better than M. Choromanski did in an interview with the composer in 1932 about his first impression of the opera he gained at age of ten (Dargomyzhsky’s Mermaid staged at the local theater) because the interviewer claimed that the composer had “recalled this as an event that had influenced his whole life and destiny” — it was for the first time that music had such a powerful impact on him.
Finally, the author of three songs to the poems of Dmitry Davydov might have described in his memoirs his private relations with Natalia Davydova, a representative of a well-known Ukrainian Hudym- Levkovych family, a painter who tried to blend avant-garde with Ukrainian applied folk art and put the latter on the worldwide stage. Natalia Davydova was the composer’s “muse and friend,” his ideal of a lady, the prototype of the only female character in the novel Ephebos. And while the atmosphere of Tymoshivka, Yelisavethrad, and Kyiv at the time when Karol visited and worked there was described true to life by his sister Zofia Szymanowska in The Story of Our House and by Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz in Meeting Szymanowski, we can only guess, due to absence of authentic testimony, about the composer’s sojourn at Verbivka, the Davydovs’ manor located, like Tymoshivka, near the legendary Kamianka, as well as about the impact the folklore exhibitions and concerts organized by Davydova had on the future pioneer of neofolklorism in Polish music.
During the Ukrainian period of his creative life, Szymanowski shunned folklore and refrained from citing Ukrainian or, with one exception, Polish tunes. This is why some contemporary Polish critics reproached the artist for not having an ethnic character and accused him of cosmopolitanism. In his polemics with them, Szymanowski insisted that his compositions were full of a profound ethnic spirit, no matter how non- folk his Metopes, Masques, or Mythes might seem. In his reflections on how to express the ethnic spirit in art, he aphoristically called music “the scent of a certain culture’s flower.”
“I always had the impression,” Zygmunt Miczelski wrote, “that what I call ‘Ukrainian-Sicilian element’ was underestimated in Szymanowski... It is only Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz, also coming from the same country, who knew about these things... We are unaware of the very close ties that bound the people of ‘frontier origin,’ of the many common features in them, such as, above all, admiration of Ukrainian boundless expanses, which allowed them to find a common language.”
This is why, when Szymanowski was in France, supervising preparations for the Paris premiere of his ballet Harnasie with Ukrainian-born Serge Lifar in the title role, and his fellow countrymen offered to show him some antique French castles, he asked, “Could you show me just a boundless wheat field?”
“There is something innermost,” the composer explained later, “which, despite outer alterations, never changes and always remains the same, almost as it was in childhood.” It is Ukraine that was this “something innermost” for Szymanowski.
