Karol Szymanowski. Music as an Autobiography

This book is not a biography, even though in its general outline it retains the chronology of Szymanowski’s attitudes and ideas. The simplest way to describe it is as a study of the composer’s imagination, produced from the perspective of the writings, snippets and literary fragments he left, with some of his vocal works also subject to interpretation here. Thus, it constitutes a most literal attempt at reconstructing the ‘internal biography’ in which the musical and literary oeuvre is steeped.

In this book, I attempt to set Szymanowski’s biography against the problem discussed by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe in his essay ‘The Echo of the Subject’, in which he poses the unexpected question of the hidden links between music and autobiography. There, the author asks: ‘What is it that ties together autobiography … the autobiographical compulsion (the need to tell, to confess, to write oneself) or music – the haunting by music or the musical obsession?’1

The conclusions drawn by Lacoue-Labarthe tend towards wider generalisations. In his view, the autobiographical compulsion has its de facto origin in the experience of absence and loss, thus being associated with a certain subjective imbalance and a confrontation with one’s deficiency, which requires completion – usually an impossibility. Therefore, the author sees the subject of every autobiography as having been marked with a sense of doubleness, loss and incompleteness. Such a sentiment of impairment, which entails the need to make oneself present (hence the writing), stemming from the very nature of mimetic representation, has its origin in the famed notion of désistance, i.e. an act of ‘ceding something to someone else’, a necessary challenge faced by anyone attempting to translate their own experience into the language (of literature or music).

Relating the considerations of Lacoue-Labarthe to Szymanowski is, I believe, particularly justified. In my view, Szymanowski is entangled in a similar mimetic scandal for at least two other reasons; therefore, he experiences it with redoubled power. I regard him as someone who, first and foremost, desires to capture the experience of his biography in music, which is why he resolves to undertake an attempt – both deliberate and doomed to failure – to cross the boundary separating these mutually asymmetrical orders. Above all, however, he continues to be an actor in an impossible autobiographical drama – as a homosexual outsider who writes his biography en abyme; hence, he incessantly grapples with the sense of its actual absence or fragmentary halving. At best, being homosexual, he settles for recording the bizarre and oftentimes desperate experience of continual maladjustment between the biography and its form – if we may thus refer to the sense of autobiographical expropriation his writings are imbued with.

The subject proper of this book is therefore the experience of evanescence, a peculiarity of Szymanowski’s imagination: the feeling of standing on the verge of presence and absence, constituting a record of his biographical and existential situation. It encompasses numerous situational and figurative variants, ranging from dispersion, erasure, doubling to the images of a blurred mirror reflection, a barely discernible echo or a voice waning in the distance.

Particularly correlated with Lacoue-Labarthe’s notion of désistance, conceived of as a deliberate choice of a halved existence, are primarily Szymanowski’s early notes, which I discuss in the opening chapters of the book (‘On the Stage of Fantasy’; ‘In Tymoszówka – Through the Keyhole’; ‘Pain and Pleasure’). These notes date back to the years of the composer’s adolescence and early adulthood. Their author intentionally places himself on the margin, as an outsider, which corresponds to his position on the stage (of life), and renders his forays into writing (i.e. the margin of his actual oeuvre) the privileged location for recording his experience.

These literary sketches, related in content to the texts the composer picked for his juvenile songs, are steeped in obstinate lugubrious fantasies revolving around the motif of the grave and the abyss. I try to make a case that these are correlated with the disfigured, phantasmal image of homosexual puberty, unable to establish an individuation scenario for itself and hence identifying with the scenes of the protagonist’s decline and death. Here, the said evanescence and erasure recur in the images of dying and burying a dead body in the grave, fear of loved ones, narcissistic doubling and the Pietà of love (‘Penthesilea’), submersion in the darkness and leaving into the night. Besides the vocal form of a dirge, their reflection in the musical narrative becomes, among other things, a repetitive rhythm, a monotonous circulatio and a refractory, dissonant, irritating tone. The composer’s writings of the period are very much interconnected with his musical (above all – vocal) output, thus providing an account of the mutual interpenetration of phantasms and songs also at the level of musical scores.

In the following chapters, I mainly discuss literary texts, the margins of the books he read, and passages from his letters. The book commences with the first writings and extends to the early 1920s, the point when their author definitively stopped taking down his thoughts in a more or less regular fashion and keeping a written record thereof, at least in the form of literature.

I see the ambivalent nature of autobiographical désistance, the play of making oneself present and then withdrawing away, as permeating the composer’s subsequent search for an appropriate form. It developed in the course of his journey to Italy, his sojourns in Sicily and Vienna, and lastly during his voyages through Russia at the time of the Great War, but also when Szymanowski assumes the strategy of dandyism towards the Polish community, keeping it at a distance with his aestheticising reserve, or when he experiences a breakthrough moment in his biography in Sicily and Vienna. Be that as it may, his homosexual mythology – a true Mediterranean fairytale and grotesque utopia, another incarnation of Neverland – continues to be rife with undercurrents of irony and sarcasm worthy of Wild, Gombrowicz (or Almódovar), thus remaining incessantly related to the obsession of absence and dispersion.

I could venture that everything I write is my autobiography, embedded in sounds.

Karol Szymanowski