POKOLENIE STALOWOWOLSKIE [pdf] - Radio Katowice SA

dealt with. It is also worth observing within this circle the music of Alexander Skriabin. It can be heard
then in La Flûte de jade, and in Le Chant, and perhaps most of all in Like at the Sea Shore… – the musical
pantheism. In Corale interludio e aria, Quartet and Partita can be noted a new tone. Its basis becomes a kind
of pantonality, founded on the rubbles of the major-minor system, built or even reactivated. The quasiimpressionism
that we had seen in Eugeniusz Knapik’s work so far seems to be retreating under the power of
quasi-romanticism, even if reflecting allusively and not literally, but still. After comes aria – singing. Singing
more than colour, although the latter one is also present. Present as the background, as the accompaniment.
In this Corale and interludio e aria Knapik’s music is blooming with singing. The singing of songs, singing
basically romantic. New romanticism? Possibly. But perhaps just – romanticism, without the adjective “new”.
So in the later output of Knapik we have some chamber music. In 1982 Hymn for the clarinet, the trombone,
the cello and the piano, and Versus 1 for the organs, in 1985 finished Verses for baritone, the horn
and the organs, Tha’ Munnot Waste No Time for three (or two) pianos and the clarinet of 1988, in 2003
completed Trio for the Violin, the clarinet and the piano, and in 2005 written Filo d’Arianna for the cello
solo. There might need to be added here something staying on the verge of chamber music and sinfonietta
I’m Approaching You for soprano and chamber orchestra to the words of Edward Stachura of 2001.
But after Islands for the chamber string orchestra (1983–84), the artistic activity of Eugeniusz Knapik
by the inspiration and for the invitation of Jan Fabre – a Belgian painter, playwright, multimedia artist of
a modernistic, post-modernistic, and post-avantgarde aesthetic orientation, was directed toward grand forms
of musical drama. A drama of the genre vision comparable with Richard Wagner’s theatrology, and “arguing”
with the vision of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s opera cycle Licht. The visionary of the stage felt that his musical
partner should be a visioner of music. The visioner of the stage looking into the future, and the visioner of
music, harboured in the past. There came then a theatro-musical tale in the shape of three operas, built upon
some psychic troubles of a Helen Troubleyn, a schizophrenic struggling with the world. Very recently Eugeniusz
Knapik has finished his fourth opera, without the partnership of Jan Fabre though, based on Melville’s
novel Moby Dick. Since the mid-80s then the chamber writing has become for Knapik – naturally – incidental.
As well as symphonic. His energy and imagination have been consumed by the musical theatre.
*
Quartet was written in 1980 by the commission from Elżbieta and Krzysztof Penderecki, to whom it had been
dedicated. The first performance of the work took place on the 28th of August, 1980 at the first private festival
organized by the Pendereckis – the Days of Chamber Music at Luslawice-Dwór. It was somewhat a double
performance. The first to be invited to perform the piece was Vilnius Quartet. Due to a very tense political
situation of the final days of August 1980 in Poland, just before the August Agreements were to be signed,
Krzysztof Droba, the program director of the festival, invited to perform at Luslawice also Silesian String
Quartet, in fear of Vilnius Quartet might not be receiving permission from the authorities to cross the Polish
border in such tense political time. During one night then took place two first performances of Eugeniusz
Knapik’s String Quartet – one by Vilnius Quartet and another by Silesian String Quartet. The piece recorded
by Silesian String Quartet received the highest scoring at the hearings at the International Composers Tribune
in Paris in 1984. The music of Quartet became then the basis to the ballet event by Jan Fabre The sound
of one hand clapping. The piece consists of two parts: Bushes Lento, misteriowo, and Singing/Song – largo,
semplice. Eugeniusz Knapik said: “My intention was to write a piece that would refer to the development
apogee that this form had reached in Beethoven’s quartets. Speaking of referring, I mean here of course not
the very composer’s technique, or the formal structure of the Beethoven’s quartets, but their weight”.
In this work then we have – like Stanisław Kosz has put it – “great dramaturgy, and – at the same time –
classical, and intelligent reflexiveness”. Krzysztof Baculewski wrote: “The conscious allusion to the great
tradition of this genre did not create here a return to the old forms or styles. The composer in a sense only
“quotes” certain chosen harmonies, not classical, not modal. They become a certain sort of a trampoline out
to a new world of sounds. It is not either the cluster harmonics or dodecaphonic melodics, or the punctualistic
texture, or rhythmical scattering. The musical language of Knapik seems to be as distant from them as it
is from the neoclassical historism. The composition reaches also to the other “layers” of consciousness of the
listener, demanding from him full devotion in tracking – as it would have been called by Berg – “vicissitudes”
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of the piece. The condition of the perception becomes here the full acceptance of the technical means: so that
they would not surprise, would not present problems to solve, no doubts”.
In the vast commentary to the work presented by Ryszard Gabryś we read: “And this content of the work,
and at the same time, the narrative integrity – transformational but not kaleidoscope-like – built not
from the easy happenings, but in the poetics of metaphor and liquefied metamorphosis, uniting “the fire
with the water”, we feel very clearly, legibly, naturally, in a two-focal set of the whole. Both parts: the
polyphonic-figurative thicket of voices, and the cantilena finale, aim at the suspension on the quasi-tonal
E-Major accord; and also, and this makes this especially important composer’s connective, and at the