ABSTRACT
Szymanowski’s inspirational journey, which took him through Austro-Germany, Italy, North Africa, Persia, Greece and finally home to Poland, can be characterised as a Homeric-Odyssean quest. 1 It was charted by oracular mythic voices, and manifest in a polyphony of sibylline enunciations as he drew upon a dazzling diversity of mythological figures (e.g. Dionysus, Narcissus and various Sirenic females) as mouthpieces of his pervasively eroticised subject [see Eroticism]. In this project he sustains the eclectic enthusiasm for mythology found in many Young Poland artists. Characteristically obsessed with contradictory visions of transfiguration and degeneration, erotic ecstasy, messianic eschatology and the bleakest oblivion, these artists returned to themes and ideas drawn from romanticised mythological sources, a move motivated by a resistance to and distaste for bourgeois confidence in positivistic ‘progress’ and a critical disdain for the scientific world view. Many sought a Nietzschean rebirth through appropriation of the Dionysian. In such visions Dionysus was often imagined in productive, sacrilegious synthesis with Eros and/or Christ. 2 Tadeusz Miciński’s drama Bazylissa Teofanu (1909), for example, has its central character involved in an attempt to confront and assimilate the Dionysian within. This exerted considerable influence on Szymanowski’s opera Król Roger, Op. 46, 3 which can be heard as the dawn of a new age of those heroes who have survived the perilous encounter with Narcissus, the Siren and Dionysus to look out to sea to the new Apollonian dawn. 4 Through recourse to mythology Szymanowski sought cultural regeneration and expressions of a new ecstatic enchantment and erotic subjective identities.
