The Poetic Symphonies of Karol Wojtyła

Abstract

The subject of this article is the Symphonie – Scalenia [Symphonies – Unifications] series contained in the juvenilia volume of Karol Wojtyła’s poetry entitled Psałterz Dawidów (Księga Słowiańska) [The Psalter of David (The Slavonic Book)]. The author, focusing on the semantics of the term “symphony,” points to those literary traditions from which the concept of combining literary and musical genres can be derived, especially the romantic correspondance des arts. Following this lead, the article shows that the poem Mοuσικη [Music] can be understood as the literary equivalent of a sonata-allegro. Above all, however, the author is interested in the very idea of the “symphony” in Wojtyła’s approach, which evolved in the later writings of John Paul II on music. The Pope’s favouring of the art of sounds as a mystical “speech without words,” which enables the harmonious combination of the human and the divine, is here presented as the transformation of his youthful idea of a “symphony” as comprehended in mediatorial terms (“merging,” “reconciliation,” “connecting”).