This week’s selection for The Gaggle Music Club is Karol Szymanowski’s Violin Concerto No.1 Op.35.

Karol Szymanowski (1882–1937) is widely considered to be Poland’s most important 20th century classical composer. Before Szymanowski, Polish music lived largely in the long shadow of Chopin; after Szymanowski, it became an integral part of European modernism.

Szymanowski was born in Tymoszówka, in what was then part of the Russian Empire (today Ukraine), into a cultivated, landowning Polish family. His early musical education consisted of absorbing late German Romanticism—Wagner and Richard Strauss above all. His early works reflected this influence.

It was during the years of World War I that he began to express a distinctive style of his own. Between 1914 and 1918, he produced the works on which his reputation rests: Myths for violin and piano, the First Violin Concerto, the Third Symphony (Song of the Night) and the conception of the opera King Roger.

These compositions were neither nationalist nor folkloristic; they were cosmopolitan at their core, steeped in myth, eroticism and mysticism. For a brief period, Szymanowski stood alongside Debussy and Scriabin as one of Europe’s most original musical voices.

After Poland gained independence in 1918, he felt a responsibility toward the musical life of the new state. As he saw it, Polish cultural nationalism had settled for mediocrity and cliches. Composers and critics celebrated “Polishness” defined by mazurka rhythms, noble gestures and patriotic atmospheres—often badly imitated from Chopin—while ignoring what was actually happening in European music at the time. To Szymanowski, this was not cultural patriotism but cultural timidity: a refusal to risk embarrassment by competing on equal terms with Paris, Vienna or Berlin.

This led to yet another drastic transformation in Szymanowski’s style. Rejecting Romantic nationalism, he turned instead to the raw, asymmetrical folk music of the Tatra highlanders. In turning to the music of the Tatra highlanders in the 1920s, he was not doing what earlier nationalist composers had done—namely, dressing conventional Romantic music in folk costume.

What attracted him to highlander music was precisely that it was difficult, abrasive and structurally alien to mainstream European norms. It was not music that flowed the way Romantic melody does. To Szymanowski, that made it modern in spirit even though it was archaic in origin.

Now, for the First Violin Concerto: By 1914 Szymanowski was effectively cut off from the European musical centers that had shaped him. The war had destroyed his family estate at Tymoszówka and with it the social and economic security he had always taken for granted. Unable to travel, he focused intensively on composition. Rather than engage in patriotic expression or public statements, he retreated into a private world of myth and poetry.

The immediate literary stimulus for the concerto was a poem by Tadeusz Miciński, a Polish Symbolist poet whom Szymanowski admired. The poem, sometimes referred to as Noc majowa (“May Night”), evokes a dreamlike nocturnal landscape filled with moonlight, erotic longing and metaphysical unease. Szymanowski did not intend the concerto to be the poem set to music. Instead, the poem’s atmosphere was to be the inspiration for the music.

Musically, the concerto marks the composer’s decisive break with the Austro-German symphonic tradition that had shaped his earlier works. Instead of a multi-movement concerto built on thematic confrontation, Szymanowski’s concerto features a violin that emerges from the orchestral texture and then dissolves back into it. This conception owes much to Debussy and Scriabin.

When the concerto was first performed in 1922, several years after its composition, it bewildered some listeners and enthralled others. For Polish music, however, its significance was unmistakable. It announced that a Polish composer could write a concerto that belonged fully to the European avant-garde of the time—neither nationalist in the conventional sense nor beholden to German models.

Szymanowski suffered from tuberculosis for much of his adult life, and he died in 1937, at the age of 54. His Violin Concerto No.1 remains his most enduring and popular work.

In this performance from 2018, Simon Rattle conducts the London Symphony Orchestra, and Janine Jansen is the violin soloist.