Mieczysław Karłowicz

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

Life

Mieczysław Karłowicz spent the first six years of life on the estate of his family in the Polish Wiszniewo, today Belarus. In 1882 the family sold their property and moved first to Heidelberg, then Prague to Dresden to finally settle in Warsaw. Already abroad during the stay of the family received the young Karłowicz contact with music by composers such as Georges Bizet and Brahms. In Dresden he began as a seven year old to learn the violin. Later he studied at the Warsaw Academy of Music violin and composition, since 1895, then in Berlin.

While studying in Berlin, he wrote his first works. Alone 1895-1896 created 22 symphonic songs. In 1901 he returned to Warsaw and completed his studies. In 1903 he founded a string orchestra in Warsaw.

1906 moved Karłowicz to Zakopane and discovered his second passion besides music: mountaineering and skiing. He joined the High Tatra Society and published reports of his mountain tours in magazines. The Tatra landscape served as a refuge for the wounded national feelings; Polish artists made from it a transfigured mystical symbol of resistance against foreign rule. Here settled the writers of the Young Poland, here it also attracted the same group of young composers who had founded in 1905 in Berlin and their representatives namhaftester Karol Szymanowski was.

In 1909, Mieczysław Karłowicz came in an avalanche killed.

Work

Although Mieczysław Karłowicz left no extensive, but remarkable oeuvre that belongs in Poland an integral part of the national musical tradition, but it is known beyond the Polish borders little. Among them are 23 songs for voice and piano, a four-movement Symphony in E minor with the nickname "rebirth", a Serenade for Strings and an expressive Violin Concerto as well as his magnum opus - six symphonic poems op 9-14. The orchestral works that were created from the age of 19 in Berlin, still partially in the style of the symphonic mainstream of the late century, but worked technically solid. The later compositions, however, are the expression of a sensitive artistic personality, which creates his world from the inside and is capable of great visions.

Footnotes

Bibliography

• Luca Sala: European fin-de- siècle and Polish Modernism. The Music of Mieczysław Karłowicz. Ut Orpheus Edizioni, Bologna, 2010.
• Henryk Anders: Mieczysław Karłowicz. Życie i dokonania. ABOS, Poznań 1998.
• Alistair Wightman: Karłowicz, Young Poland and the Musical Fin -de- siècle. Ashgate, Aldershot 1996 ( Polish translation by Ewa Gabryś: .. Karłowicz Młoda Polska i muzyczny fin -de-siècle PWM, Kraków 1996, Monograph Popularne ).