Métopes, Op. 29

“If Italy did not exist,” Szymanowski wrote in 1910, “I could not exist either.” Disillusioned by the German romantic tradition - his disenchantment about to be confirmed by a couple of years in what he later described as the “base city” of Vienna - he was just beginning to find an exciting means of escape by way of the ancient cultures of the Mediterranean. How a few visits to Italy, Sicily and North Africa, together with extensive reading round them, so comprehensively changed his style, his whole aesthetic in fact, is a complex matter. It is clear from the works he wrote or at least conceived during the First World War - Mythes, Métopes, Masques, the First Violin Concerto, the opera King Roger, to mention only the best known- that there was far more to the transformation than the liberation of his harmonies into exotic areas they hadn’t touched on before. Alongside those musical elements he had discovered in Debussy and Ravel and in Scriabin and Stravinsky, there is an extraordinary and heady combination of eroticism, mysticism and historical fantasy.

So Métopes, which was written at the composer’s home in Tymoszowka in 1915, is more than a series of picturesque panels such as he might have seen in the metopes of the ruined temples of Selinus in Sicily in 1911. It is more too than evocations of scenes from Homer, although that is certainly its ostensible purpose. The underlying point about Métopes is that all three pieces are inspired by female characters in the Odyssey and that, although each is dedicated to a woman, none of them is seen in a totally sympathetic light.

The Sirens were said to entice sailors to their death by the irresistible power of their song. Ulysses protected himself against them by filling his companions’ ears with wax and then, so that he would be in a position to hear their song without succumbing to it, had himself lashed to the mast of his ship. Szymanowski’s L’Ile des Sirènes could be taken on one level as a voyage past the island of the Sirens, their song becoming ever more powerful and then dying away towards the end, the whole piece coloured by water impressionism of unparalleled extravagance. The climax is remarkable not so much for the alluring quality of the melodic line, however, as for the desperate resistance of harmonies and rhythms that determinedly and disruptively contradict it.

Calypso was the queen of the island of Ogygia on which Ulysses was shipwrecked and where she kept him for seven years, promising him eternal youth if he stayed with her for ever. Szymanowski characterises her by a short of phrase of five notes in descending order which becomes the basis of innumerable variations for the most part hypnotic but also sad, insistent and not immune to contrapuntal contradiction.

Nausicaa was the princess who, while playing ball with her maidens on the beach, found the shipwrecked Ulysses and led him to the protection of her father, the king of the Phaecians. A formidable scherzo, Szymanowski’s Nausicaa concentrates mainly on the playful side of Homer’s heroine. And yet, as vague echoes of the two earlier movements suggest at a fairly early stage and as very clear references to Calypso seem to confirm just before the end, she is not without her feminine dangers either.