Katowice Culture Nature Festival

Program

Melancholy and Ecstasy

‘My dearest flame, upon her face you glow, / You smoulder softly, yet you burn me so!’ In this phrase, taken from the seventeenth-century love poem Roksolanki (Roxolanki ) by Szymon Zimorowic, the entire early modern era finds its symbolic expression. Since the contemporary man no longer trusts the old metaphysical certainties, he seeks to articulate and comprehend the truth of his own experience. Uncertainty lies at the heart of this condition: an inner pendulum forever swinging between despair and hope, cloudy skies and clear ones, melancholy and ecstasy. ‘Once, with due grace, I called you paradise, / Now, bolder still, I say: in hell I fry.’

The Katowice Culture Nature Festival delves into the depths of this experience, offering a wide range of works, styles, and historical periods: from Monteverdi to the classics of contemporary music. Ecstasy and melancholy – be it in their amorous, pantheistic, or mystical guises – have become central to the art of sound and a driving force behind its remarkable development over the past centuries. Music permeates the entire human existence, illuminating the innermost recesses of the soul in its constant flow.

Marcin Trzęsiok