ABSTRACT
The inspirational route to the Elysium, which took the composer through Austro-Germany, Italy, North Africa, Persia, Greece and finally ‘home’ to Poland, was an odyssey charted by the oracular voices of erotic heroes. In the work of Szymanowski, erotic desire which turns to ‘deviance’ couples with an ‘Otherness’ as Pole in a cultural predicament of suppression, marginality and alienation. Szymanowski’s work is abundantly filled with the sound of Elektra-like voices of lament and madness which express a pervading concern to recover or create an authorial source. Szymanowski’s post-Paterian mythic resurrections recall Friedrich Schlegel’s advocation of a ‘new mythology’ for modern times in which, at ecstatic moments of creativity, new mythological correspondences emerge from apparent diversity. Across Szymanowski’s work a number of mythic voices are heard, sometimes blending, occasionally contradicting, waxing lyrically and waning elegiacally. In the abundant relationships of Szymanowski’s erotic voices lies the key to the interpretation of the ‘deepest being’ lying behind surface diversity.
