Prosody and versification in relation to musical means in Karol Szymanowski’s song ‘Słowisień’ (from Słopiewnie)

Abstract

For a composer planning to write a song, the prosody of the text plays a crucial role. The distribution of accents, metrical patterns, intonation – all of those factors have a great impact on the musical setting, particularly on the rhythmical structure. The specific features of the chosen text have the power to at the same inspire and limit the musical means possible to use while setting the lyrics to music. Słopiewnie is a song cycle composed by Karol Szymanowski, based on the text of a poetic cycle authored by Julian Tuwim. The significance of those poems in the history of Polish literature stems from their experimental language, which is based on innovative vocabulary derived from the idea of ‘reconstruction’ of the imaginary Old-Slavonic language. From the structural standpoint, the text of Słowisień – the opening song from Szymanowski’s work – is an example of syllabotonism. It consists of eight lines that are equal in length and also, barring a few minor aberrations, identical in terms of their accentuation patterns. As for the former, the poem is decasyllabic; as for the latter, it follows the poetic metre of trochaic pentameter. Despite the text being regular to such a large extent, the musical setting created by Szymanowski in a way contradicts that regularity. Due to the repetition of the stress patterns – the main characteristic of a syllabo-tonic poem – one could expect analogical repetitive patterns in the musical rhythm. However, in Szymanowski’s song, each line of the text is rhythmised in a different way. The differentiation of the rhythmic motives and groups, combined with some occasional melismata that extend selected syllables, provide the text with a natural ‘flow’ which resembles speech rather than poetry. This approach is also reinforced by a certain variety with regard to the positioning of the beginning of lines in the lyrics in relation to the metrical grid, as well as by the reduction of the caesurae between some of the lines. As a result, the regularity of the original text is blurred and the song acquires its very own narrative pace.