Karol Szymanowski: Pole position

Karol Szymanowski felt his destiny was to create an authentic music for his country, Poland. So why are his earlier, 'pagan' works more popular? Adrian Jack traces a colourful life

Karol Szymanowski is the composer of the starlit night, and if ever music was made for a sultry summer evening, it's his First Violin Concerto. Played by the young Japanese violinist Kyoko Takezawa in Wednesday's Prom. Its ecstatic, trance-like quality pushes the soloist to vertiginous heights and calls on a whole armoury of advanced techniques that the composer worked out with the help of his friend and fellow Pole, the violinist Pawel Kochanski.

Szymanowski was proud of the way he succeeded in lifting the soloist from the orchestra. The sense of airy vastness created by a moderately large orchestra (including two harps, piano and several percussion instruments) is part of a sound character like no other composer's. Szymanowski's musical vocabulary draws on most of the fashionable techniques that innovative composers used in the early decades of the 20th century: the concerto opens with a strong, whole-tone colouring, but also black-against-white-note harmony like Stravinsky's Petrouchka. Later, pentatonic and chromatic melodies join bi-tonal harmonies, but all these are absorbed, not used like gimmicks, to make music that is essentially lyrical.

When he wrote the concerto in 1916, the war had forced Szymanowski to stay mostly at his family home in the Ukraine, where many Poles owned property. The Szymanowski family weren't excessively rich, and they lost most of what they had following the 1917 Revolution, but they belonged to a cultural elite who took constant travel and creative activity for granted. All Szymanowski's siblings were artistically gifted, and his sister Stanislawa sang in the first performances of his opera King Roger and Litany to the Virgin Mary. The family were related to the legendary pianists Feliks Blumenfeld and Harry Neuhaus, and the 10-year-old Karol was sent to the specialist school run by Harry's father. After moving to Warsaw to study composition, Szymanowski enlisted the financial support of Prince Wladislaw Lubomirski for a group of like-minded composers called "Young Poland in Music" and made friends with three musicians who were to promote his music in the years to come – the conductor Grzegorz Fitelberg, the violinist Pawel Kochanski and the pianist Artur Rubinstein.

He could have been a privileged, gifted charmer (for by all accounts, Szymanowski was charming) whose path through life was smooth. But it wasn't so simple. For one thing, Szymanowski was plagued by ill health, which made his energetic itinerant lifestyle all the more remarkable. He also lost his financial security with the Russian Revolution but didn't lose tastes beyond his income. He was homosexual, though no scandal was ever attached to him. He did, however, follow the familiar pattern of Mediterranean travel, and when he visited America, he liked Cuba best.

Szymanowski's desire for sexual freedom found expression in the opera King Roger. It didn't cause any problems with censors because King Roger is married (though the marriage is sexually dormant) to a wife who succumbs to the lure of a beautiful young shepherd before he does. All this is dressed up as the conflict between Dionysus and Apollo, so that the shepherd represents sensuality rather than being an object of desire in himself.

Most important, Szyman-owski felt his destiny was to create an authentic Polish music as an independent state was created after the First World War. This ambition took some time to form. Szymanowski had first to free himself from his early grounding in German Romantic music. It is always difficult to say definitely which influences are formative, but in Szymanowski's case they were various: Scriabin, recent French music and Stravinsky's early works. He found his own voice with works like Myths for violin and piano and Métopes for solo piano, both written in 1915. Inspired by his travels to Sicily and North Africa, they evoked a lost civilisation in music of the most refined craftsmanship: technically elaborate, richly detailed and expressively ecstatic while at the same time rather aloof, even evasive.

To some extent this could be explained by drug-taking; coc-aine was found on Szymanowski after his death. Whether or not he took drugs at the time of the First World War, in much of his music from this time onwards there's a sense of trance, or of "tripping". It is, or was, a relatively unusual element in classical music, though not, of course, in jazz, nor in other art-forms, and Szymanowski's friend, the writer Stanislaw Witkiewicz, actually described the effects of his own experiments with drugs.

Then in the 1920s Szymanowski discovered Polish folk music, and in particular the falling melodic motifs and cool modal patterns of the people of the Tatra Mountains. He sometimes cross-fertilised them with mazurka rhythms, and his ability to transform folk sources into something personal seems quite different from Bartok's more scholarly approach, owing more to the examples of Mussorgsky and Stravinsky, especially in his vocal music.

The first folk-inspired work was the extraordinary song-cycle Slopiewnie, too liberated in its harmony and rhythm to seem at all "folksy" in the usual sense. The most spectacular was the echoing, dreamlike ballet Harnasie, completed in 1931. But by that time Szymanowski was growing tired of folk music and feeling drawn to the chastening effect of neo-classical ideals; both the Symphonie Concertante for piano and orchestra and the Second Violin Concerto are less sumptuous, and more traditionally organised, than his earlier music.

Yet Szymanowski himself said that his Litany to the Virgin Mary, setting Polish words for soprano, chorus and orchestra, completed around the same time, was his "most profound and concentrated work", and though simplified to an extent, it is hardly neo-classical. Nothing is easily resolved in this complex composer's life, and if the Litany is his testament to his Polish and Roman Catholic heritage, some would say that the "pagan" works of the First World War era are likely to prove his enduring legacy. Besides, he once wrote that the real Polish music was to be found in "the solitary, joyful, carefree song of the nightingale in a fragrant May night in Poland". That's what you hear in the First Violin Concerto.

Szymanowski's First Violin Concerto is in Prom 16 on Wednesday 31 July at 7pm, broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 and BBC4 (020-7589 8212; www. bbc.co.uk/proms)