Mieczysław Karłowicz

It was 1876. Brahms’s First Symphony was receiving its world premiere, Tchaikovsky was putting the finishing touches to the score of Swan Lake, and Grieg was celebrating the great success of the premiere of his incidental music for Ibsen’s Peer Gynt. In the very same year as these masterpieces, on December 11th, Mieczysław Karłowicz was born. He came into the world far from the glamour of the great concert halls, in the small town of Wiszniewo, but never far from music. Music was in Karłowicz’s blood. It had been present in his life from the very beginning.
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Karłowicz’s love for the Tatra Mountains had a tragic ending. On February the 8th, 1909, the mountains he returned to whenever he had the chance, wrote about so extensively, and photographed with such devotion took him away forever in seconds. The same avalanche that claimed his life that day beneath Mały Kościelec, miraculously spared his camera. It is difficult to imagine a more poignant frame for the story of an extraordinary man for whom the mountain landscape was far more than just an aesthetic experience or a source of musical inspiration. For Karłowicz, being in the mountains was an existential experience – intense, profound and all-encompassing.

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