Szymanowski's Love Songs of Hafiz

Greetings! I'm making this blog for those who have an interest in Persian culture and also enjoy Western music. A surprising number of Western classical music pieces have used Persian poetry—mostly Hafez, Rumi, and Khayyam—for lyrics. The plots of many Western operas are based on Persian legend or history, though the Western retellings may be wildly inaccurate or fanciful. A fascination with Persia appears even in purely instrumental music by Western composers. They wrote 'Persian-influenced' music that sounded exotic and 'Oriental' to Western ears, even though very few of these composers had any idea what how Persian music actually sounded.

Karol Szymanowski was a fine composer of the early 20th century, probably Poland's greatest of that era, and his stature has been

Karol Szymanowski

growing in recent years. He wrote much music that sounds exotic and 'Oriental.' One of his major works is a set of songs for tenor with orchestral accompaniment, The Love Songs of Hafiz, which is today's selection.

Here is more about Szymanowski.

Another Wikipedia article, on The Love Songs of Hafiz, provides the German versions of Hafez poems made by Bethge that were set by Szymanowski, as well as an English translation, presumably from the German.

I could not determine from which Hafez poems Bethge made his versions. It would be interesting to trace the varying, and often highly debatable, understandings of Hafez by Bethge, Szymanowski, the English translator, and the author of the article, but that's beyond the scope of this post. It is clear, though, that Bethge knew no Persian (and no Arabic or Chinese, to name two other languages of which he made poetic versions that were enthusiastically used by Western composers):


Bethge konnte kein Chinesisch, kein Arabisch und kein Persisch - keine andere orientalische Sprache. Und doch hat er, ein Reisender in Tat und Geist, den Gehalt der östlichen Dichter wie kaum ein anderer erfaßt und in Ton, Klang und rhythmischer Musikalität zum Ausdruck gebracht. Source: http://www.yinyang-verlag.de/HansBethge.htm


Bethge knew no Chinese, no Arabic, and no Persian—no other Oriental language. And yet, a traveller in deed and spirit, he grasped the spirit of the Eastern poet like scarcely anyone else and brought it into expression through tone, sound, and rhythmic musicality [i.e., the musicality of his verses, since he wrote the words, but did not compose the music]. Translation and comment by the author of this blog.


I found no information about what source Bethge used to make his versions of Hafez; however, there was no shortage of translations and versions—nine between 1800 and 1880!—available in German. The German translations and versions are discussed here.

One of the most influential German translations of Hafez

Link to Part 2 of Rosenzweig-Schwannau's 1863 translation of Hafez (title page shown above), which contained both the original Persian and his German translation.

More about Hafez and music can be found here.

The first and second halves of a version of this work on YouTube are embedded below. The illustrations chosen by the person who posted the music on YouTube are consistent with many Western impressions of Persian poetry, emphasizing worldly 'wine, women, and song,' rather than spiritual and mystical interpretations.

Love Songs of Hafiz, songs for tenor & orchestra, Op. 26, M28 (1914)

Ryszard Minkiewicz, tenor

Polish State Philharmonic Orchestra

Karol Stryja

Szymanowski set his Hafiz love-songs in 1914, very much in the spirit of German neo-romanticism, exemplified, among other things, in the fashionable versions of Hafiz by Hans Bethge, whose second-hand versions of Chinese poems had served Mahler for his Das Lied von der Erde. The words of the songs paraphrase the verses of the 14th century mystical Persian poet. The cycle was first performed in Paris in June 1925.

Art by Mikhail Larionov