ABSTRACT
The preoccupations of other verses written in his teenage years were to remain important for Szymanowski’s mature work. Even in the late 1920s Szymanowski was still identifying ‘Promethean-ism’ as one name of the uncontrollable creative impulse, that sacrificial fanaticism which attempts to attain those heights and depths which reach and beyond the confines of everyday existence and mundane experience. As Szymanowski’s work builds in musical frenzy towards the final cadence the rhetorical bombast approaches ridiculous proportions. The imagery of Richard Dehmel’s poem is strikingly similar to that which characterizses an incomplete literary sketch that Szymanowski wrote, probably in 1903–1904: the wind has come between the shore-side reeds and bull-rushes – and they have begun to sing. In Szymanowski’s work it leads to a significant transformation of the introjected mythic identity and, in musical terms, a furtherance of the strategic reinterpretation of the means of climactic revelation.
