Mieczysław Karłowicz (1876-1909) was a Polish composer and conductor, one of the most promising composers of his generation, and one of the first in Poland to express himself intensively through the genre of the symphonic poem.
Karlowicz was born in a well-to-do musical family. In his youth, he spent some time traveling through Europe and in 1887 his family settled in Warsaw where he studied violin and later also composition. In 1895 he moved to Berlin where - besides music - he also occupied himself with music history, philosophy, psychology and physics. By the time he returned to Warsaw in 1901 he had composed several songs, many of which remain in the Polish repertory, the Serenade for Strings, the Rebirth Symphony and incidental music to the play The White Dove. A violin concerto soon followed. In 1903 he took a seat on the board of the Warsaw Music Society where he
organized the symphony orchestra. He became fascinated with the
symphonic poem and applied himself very actively to it. Between 1904 and
1909 he composed six of them. Disenchanted with Warsaw’s musical life, Karlowicz eventually spent more time abroad and at Zakopane, a vacation village in the Polish highlands, pursuing his interests in mountaineering, skiing and photography. He was also one of the first to own a bicycle. During a ski trip in February 1909, Karłowicz was caught in an avalanche and killed at a tragically young age.
The programs of his symphonic poems reflect the ideals of pantheism, expressive sorrowfulness, and Wagnerian symbols of love and death. At some times, Karłowicz’s work also moved toward the philosophy of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. A master orchestrator, Karłowicz drew on orchestral writing of Strauss, Wagner, and Tchaikovsky, but his music, dominated by a mood of sadness, melancholy, and resignation, has a clearly individual character. His symphonic poems and lieder showed a great talent.
[Zakopane, Tatra mountains, Poland]
Eternal Songs (Odwieczne Pieśni ) is Karłowicz's second symphonic poem which he completed in 1906. It is the fullest manifestation of the composer’s pantheistic credo and has three parts: 1. The song of eternal yearning; 2. The song of love and death; 3. The song of eternal Being. Karłowicz did not write a program for the work, but several musical motifs in the composition were commented on by him, such as "inconsolable yearning," "withdrawal," "death longing," "death"; the last movement was preceded by "Grandeur, power, majesty, eternity, inexorability, inevitability." This points to the influence that the philosopher Schopenhauer must have had on Karłowicz. On his trips through the Tatra mountains he had mystical experiences. For example, he wrote in one of his diaries, "When I am at a lonely height, on one of the mountain peaks, I seem to dissolve into the environment, thinking stops, I am not an individual, and I feel surrounded by the powerful, infinite breathing of eternity. The hours I spend in this semi-conscious state are a transient return to non-existence, they give peace in the confrontation of life with death, they speak to me of eternal hope and dissolution into the universe."
The first part (Andante lento) is dominated by an "eternal longing" theme first heard in the English horn. The second "song" (Andante con moto) falls into two parts: the first is a deliberately restless treatment of the love theme and the second an elaboration of the death theme derived from a funeral song. The last song (Moderato) is based on the "eternal Being" theme that seems to underline in an almost mathematical way the grandeur of Karłowicz superhuman concept.
Eternal Songs is here played by the Orquesta Sinfónica de Galicia directed by Michal Nesterowicz.
[Written with input from the article on Karlowicz at the Dutch-language Wikipedia]