200 zł Karol Szymanowski

The obverse presents the image of the emblem of the Republic of Poland against the background of a note. On the reverse side, there is a bust of Karol Szymanowski and a note composed into the figure. 

Karol Szymanowski was born on 3 October 1882 in central Ukraine. He began to learn music under his father's tutelage, and continued it under the tutelage of a local music teacher, a great lover of Romanticism, Gustaw Neuhaus, who discovered Szymanowski's compositional talent. Then he studied in Warsaw with Zygmunt Noskowski.

Szymanowski's compositions referred to Romanticism. His First Sonata in C minor, dedicated in 1904 to his friend Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, was hailed by Warsaw music critics as a work of the greatest musical talent in Poland since Chopin's death.

In 1905, together with three other Polish composers - Ludomir Różycki, Apolinary Szeluto and Grzegorz Fitelberg - Szymanowski founded in Berlin a Company of Young Polish Composers, called 'Young Poland in Music'. Inspired by modernism, especially the work of Richard Strauss, the artists published and promoted their own music. At concerts organised by the company, Szymanowski's Overture Concert was played, among others.

The 1920s was a particularly fertile period in the composer's career, he composed over a dozen pieces, including four cycles of songs, a cycle of piano miniatures and his best known opera 'King Roger'. It was Szymanowski's second opera after that completed in 1913. "Hagith". The roots of "King Roger", called the "Sicilian drama", should be sought in the journeys that the composer made between 1910 and 1914 to southern Europe and to North Africa. The idea of composing the opera was born in 1918, during a meeting with his cousin Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, who wrote a libretto to it. Szymanowski visited the United States several times in the 1920s, where he achieved great success.

Described as the father of Polish music of the twentieth century, Szymanowski is regarded, alongside Fryderyk Chopin, as the most outstanding Polish composer. His music, forgotten after World War II, is now returning to the world repertoire, performed and recorded by the best artists.