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On The Strings of My Soul on CD

Young Poland in music: The composers of "Young Poland" rebelled against positivism, not trusting the belief that reason would explain and help solve the problems of man at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Various phenomena tumbled in the cultural melting pot, lined with the philosophical concept of Friedrich Nietzsche, with his ideas of Apollonian and Dionysian beauty, or fed by the pessimistic thought of Arthur Schopenhauer. Creators of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries sought a new kind of expression - also in the song genre, which became representative still of the Romantic era, with it's idea of feeling and believing. After all, in song, as in a drop of water, it is possible to express the universe of human emotions - both from the perspective of "I" (Ich-Lieder) and

"YOU" (Du-Lieder), as one of the researchers of lyric, Mieczyslaw Tomaszewski, wrote about in his book From Confession to Crying. Studies on Romantic Song (Academy of Music in Krakow, 1997).

For the composers chosen to be the protagonists of this album, song became an expression of deep feelings, referring both to the heritage of Culture and the Nature experienced, giving the internally shattered individual a state of solace and fulfilment, albeit temporary. The tone of poignant loneliness is shown in essence, among other things, by the opening stanza from the poem Zale ('Regrets') of Lucjan Rydel, set to music by Boleslaw Raczynski: "May I not stand so alone / With my sorrow and despair, / May the stars at least weep / Looking into my window". At the same time, the lyrical subject externalizes the desire to unite his existential pain with Nature, thus opening up a cosmological space. Karol Szymanowski significantly referred to the Young Poland formation - he was it's co-founder, along with Ludomir Rozycki, Apolinary Szeluto and Grzegorz Fitelberg. In an interview in "Kurier Poznanski" in 1932, he noted: "It brought, as it were, a protest against academism, and established contact with what was happening in the wide world: the main vertical of contemporary music. What we were going for (there were several of us [... ]) was to acquire a contemporary technique of composition: contemporary

means of expression. We learned wherever we could learn something, and we carried it home. "1

In the poetics of grief, longing and nostalgia The composers immortalized on the album were Young Poland or modernist lyricists - their music was tinged with a longing and reflective note of nostalgia. A tone of sorrow, well known from the works of Fryderyk Chopin, is found in many of them. Henryk

Opienski (1870-1942) in his Piesn majowa ('May Song') musicalized a poem by Marian Gawalewicz (1852-1910), a writer and publicist associated with Lviv. The final stanza sets a lyrical mood: "Let thecharm of spring surround you, / let your heart dream / Songs, lights, and scents / flow through the green grove". Boleslaw Raczynski (1879-1937), on the other hand, drew on the poetic texts of Lucjan Rydel. The message of the poetry brings an oneiric mood: "Later, earlier / The dream will shine through / And I will stop loving... / Under my eyelid / Tears are burning me, / Tears unbidden!" (Hania IX: Wiatry zwialy ten kwiat bialy /'The winds blew away... '). Jadwiga Sarnecka (1877-1913) selected stanzas with a transcendent dimension from poetry of Rydel: "Noisy whirlwind of deaf fields / Fly as far as possible, / Take with you the bitter pain, / What burns me in my heart". Juliusz Wertheim (1880-1928) also touched on the theme of nostalgia, drawing on the poem Wszystkich kwiatow mi nie trzeba ('I do not need all the flowers') by Wincenty Rapacki (1865-1943).