Szymanowski wrote the song Penthesilea Op. 18 to an excerpt from Stanisław Wyspiański's Homeric drama Achilleis in February 1908 during his stay in Nervi near Genoa in Italy. The work was commissioned by a committee set up to commemorate Wyspiański, who had died in 1907. Penthesilea was first presented to the public in Lvov on 20th March 1910 with Szymanowski's sister Stanisława Korwin-Szymanowska as the singer and an orchestra under Grzegorz Fitelberg. Two years later, in 1912, Szymanowski re-instrumented his work.
A lyrical monologue delivered to Achilles by a dying Amazon, Penthesilea reflects Szymanowski's interest in antiquity and the ancient culture. After all, Italy was his favourite country, and he visited it a number of times. However, critics also point to a different source of inspiration:
The heroine of a Homeric myth in the arms of Eros and Thanatos must have been to Szymanowski an embodiment of the perennial poetic topic of life (love) and death (pain).1
The style of the song is late Romantic, evocative of Richard Wagner's dramas, with the dominant role of chromatism.
Penthesilea was never published in Szymanowski's lifetime. Indeed, it was not until 1977 that the score came out in print. Rarely performed, it has had few recordings, the latest one being that by Romana Owsińska and the Katowice Philharmonic Orchestra under Karol Stryja, released by Marco Polo in 1990 and by Naxos six years later.
Notes:
1 Maciej Gołąb, Pentezilea na sopran i orkiestrę Szymanowskiego, in: Pieśń w twórczości Karola Szymanowskiego i jemu współczesnych. Studia pod redakcją Zofii Helman, Musica Iagellonica, Kraków 2001, p. 91.
Author: Anna Iwanicka-Nijakowska, September 2007.