Water, time and a dark-green coat. On Chopin’s Barcarolle

• Authors: Dariusz Czaja
• Languages of publication: PL

Abstracts

PL

The Barcarolle, Op. 60 is a late (1846) Chopin masterpiece. The shrewdest interpreters (Maurice Ravel, Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz) immediately understood that this miniature represents something much deeper than just a skilful stylisation based on Italian (Venetian?) melody. The author presents and discusses in detail several hermeneutic attempts at interpreting the meanings of the Barcarolle, devoting particular attention to Iwaszkiewicz’s sketch ‘Barkarola Chopina’. He also draws attention to the peculiar rhetoric of the text (strongly marked aquatic motifs, accentuated polyvalence and the shimmering of meaning). He goes on to reveal striking connections between the semantics of Iwaszkiewicz’s essay on the Barcarolle and his texts devoted to Venice. In the final section, he puts forward the hypothesis that the Barcarolle can be interpreted as a musical portrait of Venice - a portrait made of sounds, and so by definition vague, allusive and symbolic; a portrait in which the rocking and shimmering of the notes is also the shimmering of meaning.

Keywords

PL

Fryderyk Chopin; Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz; Barcarolle; hermeneutic interpretation of music; polyvalence of meaning; Venice

• Publisher: Uniwersytet im. Adama Mickiewicza w Poznaniu
• Journal: Interdisciplinary Studies in Musicology
• Year: 2010
• Issue: 9
• Pages: 283-296

Dates

published

2018-10-17

Contributors

author

Dariusz Czaja

• habilitated doctor, lecturer in the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology of the Jagiellonian University of Cracow, member of the editorial board of the bi-monthly Konteksty, published by the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN) Institute of Art in Warsaw, essayist and music reviewer. The author of five books: Mitologie popularne: szkice z antropologii współczesności [Popular mythologies: sketches of contemporary anthropology] (Kraków, 1994), Sygnatura i fragment. Narracje antropologiczne [The signature and the fragment. Anthropological narratives] (Kraków, 2004), Anatomia duszy. Figury wyobraźni i gry językowe [The anatomy of the soul. Figures of imagination and language games] (Kraków, 2006), Lekcje ciemności [Lessons in darkness] (Wołowiec, 2009) - awarded a prize by the TVP Kultura foundation (“Gwarancja Kultury”) - and a collection of sketches from Apulia entitled Gdzieś dalej, gdzie indziej [Somewhere beyond, elsewhere] (Wołowiec, 2010), which won the Warsaw Literary Premiere for January 2011.