Like a few months' older Five Songs Op. 13, so do the Twelve Songs Op. 17 from 1907 reflect Szymanowski's interest in Modernist German poetry, in particular in poems by Richard Dehmel (song No. 1 Hoch in der Frühe / In Early Dawn, No. 2 Geheimnis / The Secret, No. 3 Werbung / Flirtations, No. 4 Manche Nacht / In the Night, No. 5 Aufblick / Reflection, No. 6 Verkündigung / Foreshadow, No. 7 Nach einem Regen / After the Storm and No. 8 Entführung / Disappointment), Alfred Mombert (No. 9 Schlummerlied / Lullaby and No. 11 Fragment - Der Glühende / Fragment Aflame), Gustav Falke (No. 10 Seele / The Sould) and Martin Greif (No. 12 Liebesnacht / Night of Love). The first four songs are dedicated to Grzegorz Fitelberg, the following four to Stefan Spiess, and the last four to Feliks Szymanowski.
The titles themselves are indicative of the topics: love, the night, secrets, wandering, death. Like in the previous collection of songs, these are again expressed through music which is late-Romantic in style - highly chromatic, with a deep, linear texture. Unlike in the previous opus, however, here the virtuoso piano part dominates much stronger over the voice. Whereas the previous cycle was well received by the critics, the reviews of the Twelve Songs Op. 17 were mostly unfavourable. The musicologist (and Chopinologist) Hugo Leichtentritt wrote in the Berlin journal Signale in 1910:
The shortcomings of '12 Songs' are far more striking. It would sound ironic to call these immensely convoluted, totally unvocal creations 'songs'. They have nothing to do with what constitutes the notion of the song. Not a trace of a song-like melody, song-like construction [...] With all this unnaturalness, artificiality of style, here and there one does, however, come across passages of amazing power and expression. These show what Szymanowski could achieve as an artist if he could free himself of the ridiculous chimera of modernity at any price.1
Opinions of this kind - interestingly, left unchallenged by Szymanowski - must have influenced the low popularity of Songs with the musicians. Rarely present in concert programmes, they had not been recorded in full until recently, when the 1998 release of eight of the songs by the German label Orfeo (in the interpretation of Claudia Barainsky and Axel Bauni) was followed by the 2004 release of the complete twelve songs by the Dutch label Channel Classics, with Urszula Kryger and Reinild Mees.
Notes:
1 Hugo Leichtentritt, Kompositionen von Karol Szymanowski, Signale für die Musikalische Welt 1910 no. 34, p. 1314, quotation from Tadeusz A. Zieliński, Szymanowski. Liryka i ekstaza, PWM, Kraków 1997, p. 53.
Author: Anna Iwanicka-Nijakowska, September 2007.