The
Four Etudes, Opus 4, date from Szymanowski’s early student days in Warsaw (1900/02), when his piano music responded above all to Chopin. Yet we need only hear a few bars of the first study, with its Brahmsian parallel sixths, or of the last study with its undisguised Wagnerian progressions, to realise that the composer was immersed in German Classical and Romantic music almost as much as in Chopin. The second and third studies suggest yet another influence. They are remarkably close in detailed phraseology to the tenth and eleventh of Scriabin’s Op 8 studies—so close indeed that it is tempting to suggest that Szymanowski may have modelled his pieces on Scriabin, though there is no direct evidence of this. (It was the third study, incidentally, which Paderewski played all over Europe in the early years of the century, achieving a measure of recognition for the young composer. Szymanowski himself had mixed feelings about such instant success. ‘It is no good thing’, he remarked wryly, ‘to write one’s Ninth Symphony at such an early age.’)
from notes by Jim Samson © 1991
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