The Poetry of A. Mickiewicz in the Chamber-Vocal Works by S. Moniuszko

Adam Mickiewicz’s poetry attracted many composers, but it left the most noticeable trace in the work of Stanisław Moniuszko, who turned to lyrical poems, ballads, sonnets, as well as excerpts from the poems Konrad Wallenrod and Dziady. Fragments of them were also used by the composer in romances included in various issues of his Home Songbooks (Śpiewnik domowy), and as a result, the texts of Mickiewicz accompanied Moniuszko from the very first works to those published posthumously. The composer’s works based on Mickiewicz’s poems, like the original source itself, represent completely different forms and genres, but they are all in the halo of Polish romantic creativity and one aesthetic and patriotic concept. The purpose of the work is to consider various ways of implementing the ballad genre and the genre of musical portrait in Stanisław Moniuszko’s chamber-vocal works based on Adam Mickiewicz’s poems. Among Moniuszko’s numerous appeals to Mickiewicz’s poetry (more than 20 works), the sixth issue in the series of Home Songbooks, written entirely on the poet’s texts, stands out. A special place in it is occupied by the ballad Fish (Rybka, 1859) based on the text of the poet’s youth work of the same name, representing the composer’s chamber vocal style in the most perfect form and written with a truly symphonic scope. The dynamic musical narrative follows all the twists and turns of the plot, its dramaturgy is based on the comparison of contrasting images, direct speech, dialogues of the characters, and replicas from the author, embodying the specifics of the poetic original. The influence of ideological and aesthetic views associated primarily with folklore and patriotic themes, the poetics and topos of Mickiewicz manifested itself in many ways in Moniuszko’s chamber-vocal works, which allows us to draw conclusions about the synthesis of meanings and symbols characteristic of romantic art

Art · Ballad · Literature · Musical · Narrative · Poetry · Sonnet · Symphony · Central European Literary Studies · Language and Culture · Polish Historical and Cultural Studies