Maria Szymanowska (1789 – 1831): Polonaise in F Minor
Largely overlooked today, Maria Agate Szymanowska was one of the most celebrated concert pianists in 1820s Europe. A personable and charming woman, her impressive list of professional contacts reads like a Who’s Who of famous early nineteenth century artists. Her personal friends included the likes of Luigi Cherubini, John Field, Johann Hummel and Gioachino Rossini. The German poet Goethe, one of her greatest and most notable admirers, dedicated love poetry to her (despite their 40-year age gap), describing her as a “ravishing Almighty of the sound world”, possessed of a “genius akin to madness”.
Szyamonowska would overcome a divorce and the disadvantages of her gender to create for herself a highly successful, self-supporting career. She was a trend-setter and utterly fearless. She was one of the first concert pianists to perform from memory, well before Franz Liszt and Clara Schumann became famous for the feat. She was also one of the first woman composers to have most of her music published within her own lifetime.
Born Maria Agata Wolowska in Warsaw, her father ran a lucrative brewery business, while his wife was a member of the szlachta, the old Polish nobility. The well-heeled Wolowskis were able to keep open house for many of the intellectual elite of their country, including poets, writers, painters and musicians. Although Maria was initially left to teach herself piano, she was soon being encouraged by her parents to perform – and also improvise – at their various social gatherings. Thus from a young age Maria became accustomed to the gushing approval of distinguished admirers, something that would stand her in good stead for later life.
There was however no question of Maria pursuing her studies at a local school or academy. Music education in Poland remained in its infancy, and even when Warsaw’s first music academy opened in 1809, girls were not permitted. Maria instead relied upon the good counsel of several local, private tutors. Although no child prodigy, her piano playing had sufficiently blossomed by 1810 that she was ready to made her debut recital. Having firstly performed in Warsaw, she then travelled to Paris to give a few concerts, sufficiently impressing Cherubini at one of the latter that he immediately went home and wrote her a piano Fantasy.
Back in Warsaw Maria married a wealthy landowner, Theophilus Josef Szymanowski. After a short hiatus, during which time she bore her husband three children, she relaunched her career with a fresh impetus in 1815. For the next dozen years, she would embark on a near continuous (and sometimes grueling) concert schedule that took her all over Europe. Although her first assignments were contained mainly to aristocratic circles, she began to appear more and more often at public, ticketed concerts as her reputation grew. Offering an impressively wide-ranging repertoire including J.S. Bach, C.P.E. Bach, Mozart, Weber, Hummel, Field and Beethoven, she became a regular face in various European cities, her growing celebrity allowing her to meet many of the leading artists of the day. She also kept abreast of all the latest technological advances in piano-making, showing a marked partiality for the heavier, richer sonorities of Broadwood pianos.
Her concert reviews were usually very positive, praising her artistry as much as her technique. “She performed two pieces by Hummel in her most spirited manner”, wrote one London journal, “throwing into her execution all the varieties of light and shade, melancholy and fire, which renders her style so pleasing.” A Weimar reviewer complimented her “tenderness, skills and precision… the depth of her emotions and the power of her creative fantasy fill her music with a richness of shadings and forms of expression.”
An instinctive and accomplished improviser, Maria had by now started to write her own music – initially with a few songs, before launching into a prolific surge of piano music in the late 1810s (soon after published by the illustrious Breitkopf & Härtel). Writing mostly in short forms and in the pre-Romantic stile brillante (so characteristic of salon music at the time), her output included nocturnes (inspired by John Field), waltzes, etudes and preludes, as well as polonaises and mazurkas – she was one of the first to use Polish dance forms in her compositions, something which would have a strong influence on Frederic Chopin.
One downside to Maria’s career success was the increasing strain it put on her marriage. She and her husband had never been ideally matched, and Theophilus was increasingly put out by his spouse’s incessant engagements and inability to settle down to wifely duties. They eventually divorced in 1820, with Maria taking the three children and largely being left to fend for herself. Thankfully she was now in a position where her work schedule of teaching, lectures and regular concerts left her financially comfortable if not yet secure.
In 1822, she made a lengthy tour of Russia, the first of several trips to the country. There she met Johann Hummel (who was also passing through) who promised to introduce her to his great friend, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. She eventually made the acquaintance of the latter a year later, spending much of the second half of 1823 with him, firstly at the spa town of Marienbad in the Czech Republic and later in Goethe’s hometown of Weimar.
Despite recovering from both a recent heart attack and a tumultuous liaison with a 19-year-old girl, Goethe was in no mood to wind down his amorous adventures. He fell deeply in love with Maria, as much for her playing as her physical charms. He wrote not long after to a friend: “I heard Mad. Szymanowska, an unbelievable pianist; she may be placed alongside our own Hummel, save that she is a beautiful amiable Polish woman… however, if she stops [playing] and comes and looks at one, one does not know whether one should consider oneself fortunate that she has stopped?”
Goethe later wrote love poems, not only to Maria, but also (a little opportunistically) to her sister Kazimiera, who usually accompanied Maria on her tours. To Maria he wrote directly of “the twofold bliss of music and of love” engendered by her playing. One might have imagined the septuagenarian poet and the beautiful young virtuoso to be a complete mismatch, but there is some evidence (as reported by their mutual friend Carl Friedrich Zelter) that Maria returned the feelings or at least was very fond of the old man. Maria would later tell Goethe how much she had valued their time together in Marienbad.
Maria’s ultimate destiny wasn’t however Weimar but St Petersburg. During her Russian tour she had so impressed the Tsar that he had asked her to become a pianist for the Russian royal court, the first woman to be appointed to such a role. Maria accepted and decided to settle permanently in Russia as the job not only gave her a safe, well-remunerated position, but also opened further doors for her.
Typically, she had already made several good friends in Russia, one of whom was famous Irish émigré, John Field. Musically speaking, they were kindred spirits – Maria was even once dubbed the “female John Field” – with a good deal of stylistic cross-over in their piano music. But while they could inspire one another, there was never too much creative dependency. One of Maria’s finest pieces, her Nocturne in B Flat Major, takes her colleague’s musical world as a starting point but then develops it further, with several dramatic and contrasting sections which clearly anticipate Chopin. By contrast, her Polonaise in F Minor, written in around 1825, is simpler in concept, but imbued with a delicious melancholy and filled with endlessly soulful melodies.
A further selection of her piano music can be found here.
Maria consolidated her position in St Petersburg’s musical life by setting up her own salon, attended by many of the good and the great of the city. Just when her star seemed to be shining at its brightest, a cholera epidemic swept through the Russian capital in the summer of 1831, taking her as one of its 6,000 victims. She was just 41 years old.
News of her death quickly spread to the far corners of Europe. “We are much pained to announce the death of Madame Szymanowska, an amiable lady and accomplished pianoforte player,” announced the London Atlas soon after. “If this be the class of artist which the cholera selects, woe be to music, for it will single out her choicest ornaments.”
In a post-Napoleonic time of social and political regression, where opportunities for artistic women were once more in decline, Maria had nonetheless established for herself an almost unprecedented status by the time of her death. Industrious, self-assured and always painstaking about her stage image, she did much during her lifetime to lay a platform for the next generation of women composers.