COMPOSITION“KING ROGER” KAROL SHIMANOVSKY IN PRESENTING IDEAS BLESSING OF THE FAITH
Authors: Tatarnikova Anzhelika 
Published: May 2023

The idea of worshiping Orthodoxy may have long hindered the recognition of the work in Poland itself, where Catholic religion became a component of national emblematics, although it premiered in Poland at the Warsaw Bolshoi Theater in 1926. But in the reference literature it is noted that “much greater success than in Warsaw was “King Roger” in musical Prague (1932) and later in Palermo in Sicily in 1949, where he was staged at the local Teatro Massimo with the participation of the famous Italian artists, in a re-enactment of Bronislaw Horowicz and under the direction of Mieczyslaw Mezheevsky”. And further the author of the same essay in the “Guide to the Opera” J. Kanski noted: “King Roger is an unusual opera. Unusual was already conceived in the imagination of the composer and masterfully realized by Yaroslav Ivashkevich the concept of libretto, which made the place of the action medieval Sicily, interweaving the atmosphere of austere asceticism of the then Christianity with the colorful and mysterious world of Arabic and Byzantine culture, in the figure of the Pastor, who later transformed into the Greek god Dionysus)”. Later on, Kanysky states a whole list of “oddities” that distanced this work from the general public – and the first in that list is “the strangeness of the music itself”, in which the opera-ballet and cantat-oratorial typological components exhibit a high level of artistry, has direct analogues neither in Polish nor in the world as a whole. J. Kansky’s sentence is as follows: what remains of Shimanovsky’s “work is beautiful and lonely”. Such a summary clearly ignores the Eastern and Central European analogies, since the impulse for K. Shimanovsky’s “Dionysian mysteriousness” can be traced back to O. Borodin’s “Polovtsian Ecstatic” the glorification of “severe asceticism” in “St. Francis of Assisi” by O. Messian, whose spiritual ideas were nourished by the Hesychastic energy of the prayerful ecstasy of the mysteriousness of O. Scriabin. However the recognition of K. Shimanovsky really only took place at the beginning of the third millennium, and the Christian background of the Scriabin ecstatic, which was vigorously discussed in the Odesa press in the 1910’s, along with the mysterious samples of the “Drama of the Spirit” by V. Rebikov – was not extended in the 1920’s – 1930’s, when only the folkloristic national-demonstration innovations of the composer were appreciated. In S. Gelman’s preface to the publication of the score of this work by K. Shimanovsky we find some reflections on its genre meaning, from which it is clear that “King Roger” does not represent a pure operatic discovery, but rather constitutes the border of opera and musical drama, marked, however, equally by elements of oratorial, and even features of the mysterious spectacle. This commentary sees the Wagnerian influence, without noticing at the same time the Eastern European origins of K. Shimanovsky’s score and the outspoken scribbling of the composition born in the Ukrainian South. In general, the work has the features of stage oratory, as we find it in the version of I. Stravinsky’s works, and later by K. Orff.