Karol Szymanowski à la rencontre des arts

Music, literature and visual arts around stage works: the opera King Roger and the ballet Harnasie

Foreword by Jim Samson - Preamble by Jean-Michel Bardez

Everyone who met Karol Szymanowski was seduced by its charm and elegance. Refinement, sensuality, great culture, openness, hedonism, are the key words to describe it. Extra-musical inspiration is a powerful driver of his work. The result is a particularly colorful art, full of scholarly references to distant countries and times. In order to claim to circumscribe this fascinating character and to offer original insights into his creation, this book successively tackles the different aspects of his encounters with other arts. Starting from his aristocratic education (his travels, his musical experiences, readings), his sources of inspiration (which combines the ancient and the East, the Italian Renaissance and décadentismes of the "Young Poland"), his writings (including Ephebos novel ever translated into French, lost, whose content has been reconstructed from fragments preserved and descriptions), it is to get two masterpieces: the opera the King Roger and the ballet Harnasie, results of his research of a total art, inspired by Wagner and at the same time quite original.

PUBLISHED WITH THE COMPETITION OF CNL (Centre National du Livre)

Collection Pensée Musicale