Mieczysław Karłowicz

Mieczysław Karłowicz

Mieczysław Karłowicz (born December 11, 1876 in Wiszniewo , † February 8, 1909 in the mountains of the High Tatras ) was a Polish composer .

Life

Mieczysław Karłowicz spent the first six years of his life on his family's estate in Wiszniewo, Poland, now Belarus . In 1882 the family sold their property and first moved to Heidelberg , then via Prague to Dresden , and finally settled in Warsaw . During the family's stay abroad, the young Karłowicz came into contact with the music of composers such as Georges Bizet and Johannes Brahms . In Dresden he began taking violin lessons at the age of seven . He later studied violin and composition at the Warsaw Music Academy, and from 1895 in Berlin .

He wrote his first works during his studies in Berlin. Between 1895 and 1896 alone, 22 symphonic songs were written, and the Serenade for String Orchestra, Op. 2, also comes from Karłowicz's time in Berlin. It was premiered by his teacher Heinrich Urban and the Berliner Philharmoniker . In 1901 he returned to Warsaw and finished his studies. In 1903 he founded a string orchestra in Warsaw.

In 1906 Karłowicz moved to Zakopane and discovered his second passion besides music: mountaineering and skiing. He joined the Polish Tatra Society and published reports from his mountain tours in magazines. The Tatra landscape was then a refuge for hurt national feelings; Polish artists transfigured it into a mystical symbol of resistance against foreign rule. This is where the writers of Young Poland settled, and this is where the group of young composers of the same name, who founded in Berlin in 1905 and whose most famous representative was Karol Szymanowski , moved.

In 1909 Mieczysław Karłowicz was killed in an avalanche accident while on a solo ski tour.

plant

Mieczysław Karłowicz did not leave behind an extensive but remarkable oeuvre , which is an integral part of the national musical tradition in Poland, but is hardly known beyond the Polish borders. These include 23 songs for one voice and pianoforte, a four-movement symphony in E minor with the nickname “Rebirth”, a string serenade and an expressive violin concerto in A major as well as his magnum opus - six symphonic poems op. 9-14. The orchestral works, which were created in Berlin from the age of 19, are partly still in the style of the symphonic mainstream of the turn of the century, but with dignified craftsmanship. The later compositions, on the other hand, are the expression of a sensitive artistic self that creates its world from within and is capable of great visions.

Footnotes

1. ↑ Volker Michael: Festival Chopin and his Europe. Deutschlandfunk Kultur , August 31, 2018, accessed on September 24, 2018 . 
2. ↑ Nyffeler, Max: Sudden gestures of renunciation and contemplation. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung No. 78, April 2, 2011, page 38
3. ↑ ibid.

bibliography

• Luca Sala: European Fin-de-siècle and Polish Modernism. The Music of Mieczysław Karłowicz . Ut Orpheus Edizioni, Bologna 2010.
• Christophe Jezewski, Le Retour d'un génie. Pour le centenaire de Mieczysław Karłowicz , in "Europe", n ° 961, Paris, May 2009
• Janusz Mechanisz, Mieczyslaw Karlowicz, Polihymnia 2009.
• Henryk Anders: Mieczysław Karłowicz. Życie i dokonania . ABOS, Poznań 1998.
• Alistair Wightman, Karłowicz, Young Poland and the Musical Fin-de-siècle , Aldershot, Ashgate, 1996; Polish translation: Ewa Gabryś, Karłowicz. Młoda Polska i muzyczny fin de siècle , Cracow, PWM, 1996 (monograph popularne) .
• Leszek Polony, Poetyka muzyczna Mieczysława Karłowicza , Krakow, PWM, 1986.
• Paul-Gilbert Langevin, Musiciens d'Europe , la Revue Musicale, Editions Richard Masse, Paris, 1986.

• Elżbieta Dziębowska, éd. Z życia i twórczości Mieczysława Karłowicza , Krakow, PWM, 1970.

Web links

• Works by and about Mieczysław Karłowicz in the catalog of the German National Library