KARŁOWICZ FEST | An Episode at a Masquerade

This concert has been designed as a clear musical arch, leading us from the beginning of Mieczysław Karłowicz’s artistic journey to its sudden and tragic end. Richard Strauss’s Don Juan, which opens the evening, may be seen as a symbol of the youthful stage of Karłowicz’s compositional output – his years of study in Berlin, his fascination with new music, and his search for a personal musical language. Strauss, his contemporary, was one of the composers Karłowicz admired most. He was impressed by Strauss’s scale, imagination, and bold orchestration. Karłowicz sought out his works, studied his scores, and consciously turned toward what was new and innovative.

The next two works bring us to the final period of his life. A Sorrowful Tale, Op. 13, completed in July 1908, is an exceptionally moving composition. Karłowicz did not provide a detailed programme for the work, yet his own comments clearly suggest that it portrays the psychology of a person facing an ultimate decision, engaged in an inner struggle between the desire to live and the growing urge to bring life to an end. The music unfolds slowly, in the dark and richly coloured sonorities of the orchestra, leading to a climax of immense expressive power.

Alongside this work stands An Episode at a Masquerade, a unique composition because it was left unfinished by Karłowicz and completed after his death by Grzegorz Fitelberg. Materials found in the composer’s room made it possible to reconstruct almost the entire conception of the piece. Fitelberg described the music as a picture of a swirling, festive masquerade crowd, within which a figure consumed by longing and passion searches among the revellers for someone who has been lost. When the person is finally found, the encounter brings no fulfilment. The words are spoken: “I do not know you...” A note written by Karłowicz himself in the margin of the score adds: “What is gone will not return.” The crowd carries them away once more, and the feeling remains unfulfilled.

The theme of A Sorrowful Tale later gave rise to various speculations and misunderstandings concerning the tragic end of the composer’s own life. Karłowicz’s friends firmly rejected such suggestions. They emphasised his inner discipline and sense of responsibility – it is difficult to imagine that a man of such character would deliberately leave unfinished a work on which he was actively engaged. They also pointed to his strong family ties. In the will he drew up on 14 November 1908, he left his estate to the Warsaw Music Society and excluded his mother, to whom he was deeply devoted. Had he been planning his premature death, the document would surely have taken a different form.

In this next concert of the festival devoted to Karłowicz’s symphonic music, the same themes return: transcendence and unfulfilled love. Karłowicz repeatedly revisited the same emotions and experiences, as if trying to understand them. He was drawn to what lies beyond everyday life – to feelings that refuse to fade and memories that keep returning.

Listen to selected excerpts from the concert programme: