His third period was influenced by the folk music of the Polish Górale people, including the ballet Harnasie, the Fourth Symphony, and his sets of Mazurkas for piano.

[2] Karol Szymanowski was born into the Korwin-Szymanowski family who were members of wealthy Polish nobility from the Mazovia region, the capital of which is Warsaw.

Karol's grandfather Feliks later settled in the village of Tymoszówka, which was then in the Kiev Governorate of the Russian Empire and is now Tymoshivka in Cherkasy Oblast of Ukraine.

During that time, he met a number of prominent Polish artists such as Arthur Rubinstein, Grzegorz Fitelberg, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz and Stefan Żeromski.

Being lame in one knee made Szymanowski unsuitable for military service in World War I, and between 1914 and 1917, he composed many works and devoted himself to studying Islamic culture, ancient Greek drama, and philosophy.

The dynamic extremes in Szymanowski's music lessened, and the composer started to employ coloristic orchestration and use polytonal and atonal material while preserving the expressive melodic style of his previous works.

Arthur Rubinstein found Szymanowski different when they met in Paris in 1921: "Karol had changed; I had already begun to be aware of it before the war when a wealthy friend and admirer of his invited him twice to visit Sicily.

"[8] Of his works created or first imagined, such as Król Roger (King Roger), during 1917-21, both musical and literary, one critic has written: "we have a body of work representing a dazzling personal synthesis of cultural references, crossing the boundaries of nation, race and gender to form an affirmative belief in an international society of the future based on the artistic freedom granted by Eros.

He immersed himself in the culture of the Polish Highlanders (Gorals) and embraced their tonal language, syncopated rhythms, and winding melodies in his music.

[a] His body was brought back to Poland by his sister Stanisława and laid to rest at Skałka in Kraków, the "national Panthéon" for the most distinguished Poles.

According to Jim Samson, it is "played on two fiddles and a string bass" and "has uniquely 'exotic' characteristics, highly dissonant and with fascinating heterophonic effects".

His works were performed throughout the world by soloists such as Arthur Rubinstein, Harry Neuhaus, Robert Casadesus, Paweł Kochański, Bronisław Huberman, Joseph Szigeti, and Jacques Thibaud, and by orchestras led by conductors including Emil Młynarski, Albert Coates, Pierre Monteux, Philippe Gaubert, Leopold Stokowski, and Willem Mengelberg.

European and American performances of his Stabat Mater were world-scale events, progressing successfully in Naples, Paris, Liège, New York, Chicago and Worcester.

A performance of King Roger in Prague on 21 October 1932 directed by Josef Munclingr closely reflected Szymanowski's own idea of the piece, and was a huge success, as was the stage production of Harnasie.

[3] English conductor Sir Simon Rattle has called Szymanowski "one of the greatest composers of this [20th] century” and produced a series of recordings with the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.

In 2004, Scottish violinist Nicola Benedetti won the BBC Young Musician of the Year with a performance of Szymanowski’s Violin Concerto No.

[17] On 11 November 2018, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the regaining of Polish independence, President Andrzej Duda posthumously awarded Szymanowski and 24 other distinguished Poles Poland's highest decoration, the Order of the White Eagle.

[18] Szymanowski inspired the character of composer Edgar Szyller in Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz's novel Fame and Glory (Polish: Sława i chwała).