‘Słowisień’ by Karol Szymanowski. Between formal logic and illustration

Abstrakt

Julian Tuwim’s poem ‘Słowisień’ consists of two stanzas. Szymanowski’s song displays the form ABA'+coda. The non-obvious choice of a ternary form seems to be motivated by Szymanowski’s particular reading of Tuwim’s poetry. I put forward the thesis that the key to this puzzle is the dialectical opposition between day (A) and night (B), reconciled with the song of the nightingale, which has both solar and lunar attributes (A'). In this light, the hierarchy of the caesurae becomes clear: a relatively sharp cut separates section A from section B (day from night), while the transition from B to A' (towards the nightingale) is soft, smooth, because the earlier opposites combine in the recapitulation. This division of the form and the related dialectics also organise other parameters of the work: the harmony (the ‘warm’ centre of quasi-A7 in section A, the ‘cold’ centre of quasi-B flat minor in section B, the synthesis of both centres in A'); the melody of the vocal part (the rhythmic features of section A and pentatonic motif of section B coming together in A'); the metre (successive polymetre, with section A dominated by 3/8 and section B by 4/8, the imposition of 4/8 in the voice part and 6/8 in the piano part in section A').