ABSTRACT
Completion of King Roger left the way open for an unimpeded investigation of the 'lechitic' tendency already evident in Slopiewnie. Even while struggling with the instrumentation of the opera, Szymanowski had started work on a series of 20 mazurkas which were eventually published in five sets of four as his Op. 50. By the end of 1924, 16 were completed and a further four were added in the early months of 1925. This continuation of the 'crystallization of elements of racial inheritance' took the form of 'easy and practical piano pieces', 1 as Szymanowski described them to Hertzka. As Chybinski remarked, these works constitute an 'all-Polish synthesis' in which characteristics of highland music, in particular the raised fourth and lowered seventh degrees of the scale, are fused with alien rhythmic characteristics of the mazurka (Tatra music is almost invariably in duple metre). In fact, the Op. 50 mazurkas provide an excellent demonstration of the exploitation of Tatra barbarism to invigorate by cross-breeding a moribund tradition which had been in steady decline since Chopin's contribution to the genre. Mazurka elements in Szymanowski's works are most evident in rhythmic patterns, phrase structures and melodic shapes. Instead of using exact replicas of folk mazurka rhythms, however, Szymanowski employed free amalgams of typical dotted-note, even quaver and triplet rhythms. Other atypical devices include the occasional use of rhythms falling across the bar-lines, thus forming two or four-beat patterns. On the other hand, dynamic stresses typical of the folk mazurka are regularly employed, and like those of the folk mazurka can fall on any beat of the bar. Phrase structures are not invariably symmetrical: there are, for example, three-bar phrases in the second mazurka, and some of five bars length in the eleventh and seven bars in the sixteenth. On the other hand, the very typical Polish folk practice of building up phrases of one bar cells is retained on occasion (No. 8).
