Songs

Zygmunt Mycielski’s song oeuvre comprises a number of moving songs – both stand-alone pieces and those forming cycles.

The composer wrote them throughout his life, using poems by some of the greatest Polish poets, including Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, Czesław Miłosz or Zbigniew Herbert.

From his earliest years in his home village of Wiśniowa Zygmunt Mycielski had contact with art. The Wiśniówa manor resonated with music, smelled of painting (the metaphor is the result of the intense smell of turpentine used to clean brushes and painting tools), and was full of books, the collection of which was regularly replenished. In the evenings the composer’s mother – Maria Mycielska née Szembek – would read to her sons the Bible as well as works of Henryk Sienkiewicz, Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Słowacki, Victor Hugo, Leo Tolstoy and others. Mycielski’s artistic sensibility was greatly influenced by contacts with some of the most eminent Polish artists of the period, who were invited to the hospitable Wiśniowa manor. Very early on Mycielski began to write down his first thoughts, pouring his intimate world of emotions and experiences onto the pages of his diary. He provided a very vivid description of his reaction to music:

Whenever anyone among the adults played something, they would find me engrossed in music, with my gaze fixed on the magical instrument, an old, eternal Erard [...] My sensitivity to sounds was so acute that every instance of playing, touch of the keys, drove me into a kind of emotion which I think I can only compare with some kind of trance. These impressions may have been so strong, because I was so unfamiliar with music. Each piece was for me a mysterious jungle in which modulation, rhythm, melody affected me like some mental alcohol (Zygmunt Mycielski, [Pamiętnik], Zygmunt Mycielski Archive, Manuscript Department, National Library in Warsaw, III 14360, no. 020751).

Mycielski was similarly sensitive to words. His inner intuition, his sensitivity to the musicality of the text and its ability to “submit” to compositional treatment meant that he was extremely spot-on in choosing literary sources of inspiration for his works.

Initially, he went for little known poetry – his first song, Śmiech (1927), was written to a poem by Józef Krzyszkowski. Then came names of high stature in Polish culture: Leopold Staff ([Cztery pory roku], 1928), Emil Zegadłowicz (Triolets, 1928–1929), Cyprian Kamil Norwid (Litość, 1930), Marii Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska (Gorzka zatoka, 1932), Bruno Jasieński (Five Wedding Songs, 1934), Czesław Miłosz (Ocalenie, 1946; Napisane wczesnym rankiem, 1971), Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz (Brzezina, 1951; Krągły rok, 1965–1967) and Zbigniew Herbert (Eight Songs, 1983–1984). In addition, during his Paris period Mycielski found the courage to set to music one of his own poems (Gdzieżeście?!, 1932). He also chose three poets from outside Polish culture: the Roman poet and philosopher Petronius (Three Songs, 1935), Rainer Maria Rilke (Stimme eines jungen Bruders, 1938) and Alexander Pushkin (Liberty, 1949).

Asked by Elżbieta Markowska about the role of word-based inspiration in vocal-instrumental works, Mycielski admitted perfunctorily: “the text always easily ‘guides’ me” (Elżbieta Markowska, Zygmunt Mycielski, “Dwie rozmowy”, Res Facta Nova 1994 no. 1, pp. 37–41). As we listen to his songs, we indeed have the impression that the poetry determines the musical setting, as if the music “were carried” by the poetic word. Thus, what seems very important to an interpreter of his songs is the recognition of the criteria determining the choice of texts. Although in the interview with Elżbieta Markowska Mycielski did not intend to expound on the subject of the relations between words and music, in his commentary to Psalm XII he included a very important clue:

In vocal works I make sure that there is a close link between the music and the text. Not consonants or vowels, which are pronounced differently in different languages, but the text carrying some content (Zygmunt Mycielski, [commentary to:] Psalm XII, in Programme Booklet of the 1984 Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music, p. 14).

Thus, as the above words suggest, the semantics and expression of a poem played a primary role in the composer’s choice of the source of inspiration, while its sound layer was at most a secondary criterion in text selection.

Before Mycielski managed to assimilate in Paris – the “capital of neoclassicism” – a range of means with which he then became proficient in many musical genres, he was close to the stylistics of late Romanticism, which, combined with panache – as a “sin” of his youthful oeuvre – made itself felt in the first songs, included in the collection Compositional Sketches 1927.

It contains the following songs: Śmiech for alto with piano to words by Józef Krzyszkowski (Wiśniowa, 1927), Cztery pory roku for soprano and piano to words by Leopold Staff (Wiśniowa, 1928), Triolets for soprano and piano to words by Emil Zegadłowicz (Wiśniowa, 1928–1929, rev. 1931), Litość for soprano and piano to words by Cyprian Kamil Norwid (Paris, 1930), Gorzka zatoka for soprano and piano to words by Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska (Wiśniowa, 1932), Gdzieżeście?! for soprano and piano to words by the composer himself (Wiśniowa, 1932), and Stimme eines jungen Bruders for soprano and piano to words by Rainer Maria Rilke (Bukowina Tatrzańska, 1938). The collection does not include Mycielski’s highly important pre-war cycle Wedding Songs to fragments of the poem Słowo o Jakubie Szeli by Bruno Jasieński (Orniany, 1934) and Three Songs to words by Petronius (Paris, 1935).

Śmiech and Cztery pory roku can certainly be described by means of the words put by Mycielski on the title page of his sketchbook: “not to be published, for I’m not yet content with them”. He saw this, when consulting the first song from the list (with the piano Allegro molto) with Karol Szymanowski during a private meeting on 30 January 1928 in Warsaw. It seems that the nineteen-year-old composition student wanted to present a number of ideas which he was unable at the time to use to develop the musical form. No wonder, therefore, that having examined the manuscripts, Szymanowski said: “You don’t know the form”. The compositions were constructed as an assembly of small musical ideas, which consequently led to a lack of a logical, smooth narrative. The fact that the works were chopped into irregular, several-bar segments, almost each of which was based on a dynamic arch with a characteristic build-up, reinforced by fragmentation of rhythmic values and slight tempo fluctuations, clearly demonstrated an inability to plan the fluctuations of tension and relaxation – afflictions typical of the composer’s youthful personality.

What should be regarded as the most important pre-war song cycle and, at the same time, a song cycle crucial do the development of Mycielski’s career as a composer, is Five Wedding Songs.

Five Wedding Songs, title page with dedication. Gebethner i Wolff 1939

Among the words from before a stylistic turn (which occurred in the second half of the 1950s) we should also mention the song cycle composed to Czesław Miłosz’s poem “Przedmowa” [Preface] – Ocalenie [Rescue] for mezzo-soprano or baritone with piano (1946) and the song Brzezina written to words by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz (1951).

The next significant songs in Mycielski’s oeuvre were written in the so-called modernist period, with the composer using a system of tables (the song cycle Krągły rok for baritone (tenore profondo) and piano to words by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, Napisane wczesnym rankiem for tenor profondo and piano to words by Czesław Miłosz). Unfulfillment, resentment, protest against the passage of time – these themes, present in Miłosz’s oeuvre, were close to Mycielski. Very often he would note, disappointed, in his diaries: “too late”, “not a good time”, “I’d like to finish/write this”... From a musical perspective, in Napisane wczesnym rankiem Mycielski continued the line set by the cycle Krągły rok. Moved by the poetry of Zbigniew Herbert, in 1983–1984 he composed Eight Songs for baritone and piano, which he initially wanted to call Last Songs (Zygmunt Mycielski, Niby-dziennik ostatni 1980–1987, Wydawnictwo Iskry, Warsaw 2012, p. 456.). Mycielski took individual lines from Herbert’s poem, giving them a new, reinterpreted and personal meaning, complemented by the intimacy of the musical layer. The melodeclamatory text found an expressive complement in the piano part, with the composer using means typical of his musical language.

Listening to Zygmunt Mycielski’s songs and interpreting them on the basis of autobiographical themes, as well as looking at the extraordinarily apt selections of poems he chose to complement with his musical layer, we can – it seems – reach a world of deep inner experiences, which in songs reflected, like a mirror, personal dramas, doubts, frustrations and emotions...