Mikalojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis, Amzinybé, 1906. From Ciurlionis (Vaga, Vilnius, 1984)

A major highlight of the Bard SummerScape’s 2008 celebration of “Prokofiev and His World” will be productions of two rapturous works by Polish composer Karol Szymanowski.

Considered by many the father of modern Polish music, Karol Szymanowski (1882-1937) – a friend and contemporary of Prokofiev’s – set philosophical issues to a glorious score in his 1924 opera KING ROGER (THE SHEPHERD), a work of volcanic emotional and spiritual intensity, in a libretto he wrote in collaboration with Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz. The title character, an enlightened twelfth-century Sicilian monarch, discovers that a mysterious shepherd, who preaches a gospel of erotic abandon, is challenging his authority. King Roger, seeing his queen and court seduced by the shepherd’s revolutionary credo, angrily confronts him, only to experience a rapturous revelation that fuses his rational and sensual selves.

The 90-minute opera was given its premiere in Warsaw in 1926, to enormous critical acclaim. In a CD review in Gramophone magazine, King Roger is described as “a ravishingly beautiful opera,” with “orchestral textures [that] are voluptuously rich and subtly colored.”

Preceding King Roger will be another rarely performed masterpiece – the 1931 pastoral dance HARNASIE. Like his countryman Fryderyk Chopin, Szymanowski was frequently inspired by Polish folk music. From the early 1920s, Szymanowski spent much time at his home in Zakopane, finding a rich source of inspiration in music of the Tatra mountain folk for Harnasie and other works. Harnasie tells the story of a reluctant peasant bride who falls in love with an outlaw named Harnaś, the leader of a gang of mountain bandits. This remarkable hybrid work, which is based on a scenario by Jerzy Rytard and the composer himself, features a transcendent score that includes a tenor soloist and a massive choir. It is considered the crowning achievement in Szymanowski’s theatrical output, and has been favorably compared with Bartók’s Cantata Profana, among other works. Harnasie was given its premiere in Prague in 1935, and was an enormous critical and popular success at the Paris Opera the following year.

Szymanowski’s two largest works for the stage were written at very different junctures in his career. King Roger capped a period when he was especially interested in ancient Greek and Arab literature and art, and explored the Nietzschean tension between Dionysian and Apollonian impulses, while Harnasie was the culmination of a period, starting in the mid-1920s, when Szymanowski drew his greatest inspiration from Polish materials. Whereas King Roger engages sober intellectual issues, Harnasie embraces the vitality of the everyday.