Literature and visual arts as a source of inspiration

This article is a contribution to scientific research on this aspect of Krystyna Moszumańska-Nazar’s musical output which concerns the connections between her music and other arts, primarily literature and the visual arts, as well as inspirations flowing from nature, religion, philosophy, and broadly understood culture. The article applies structuralist methodology. The starting point for the analysis of the phenomena in question is the musical work itself, its title and its structure, and in the case of vocal-instrumental works - the content and message of the literary text and the person of its author. In the part of the article which deals with the biography and artistic personality of Krystyna Moszumańska-Nazar, as well as by quoting the composer’s own statements in the text, I draw on the personalistic method, especially highly valued in 20^th-century philosophy; this method emphasises the role of the human person and personality in analytic work.

In the musicological literature to date there exists no separate, large-scale study dedicated to the subject of non-musical inspirations in the works of Krystyna Moszumańska-Nazar. This topic has been tackled, however, in scientific dissertations dealing with various aspects of the composer’s work. For example, inspirations from the sphere of the sacrum have been indicated by Marek Stefański (2011), whereas Ewa Mizerska-Golonek (1992) writes about inspirations derived from the Biblical text in Krystyna Moszumańska-Nazar’s Song of Songs, and Hanna Kostrzewska (2012) discusses painting as a source of inspiration in the composer’s oeuvre. The main source of information on this subject, however, are the composer’s own statements: her ‘Autorefleksja kompozytorska’ [‘The Composer’s Self-Commentary’]

K. Moszumańska-Nazar, ‘Autorefleksja kompozytorska’ [‘The Composer’s Self-Commentary’], in K. Kasperek, Krystyna Moszumańska-Nazar. Katalog tematyczny utworów, Cracow, Academy of Music, 2004, pp. 149–153.