ABSTRACT
Szymanowski experienced a creative icebreak, which brought with it a 'spring river of new music' 1 in the weeks immediately following his resignation from the Academy. In a letter to Zofia Kochanska, written on 9 March 1932, he wrote of his terrible desire to work on a new concerto with Pawel, and that in the two weeks since he had at last been able to take refuge in Zakopane, he had completed a further nine Kurpian songs and started a piano concerto, 'writing freely and without self-criticism'. 2 Interestingly, Szymanowski cranked the machine into action once again, not through totally 'free' composition, but transcription and arrangement of folk-songs, and it was during the two weeks or so that he worked intensively on these elaborations, that Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz stayed with him, working on his short story Brzezina [Birchwood] in a room immediately above Szymanowski's studio. He was later to observe that Szymanowski's working methods had remained unchanged since his Tymoszowka days. He still composed at the piano, a terrible hired instrument which Anna Iwaszkiewicz likened to a harpsichord, singing 'in his characteristic falsetto'. 3
