W.E. Waltz
Abel Korzeniowski
Abel Korzeniowski's "W.E. Waltz" is string music of the grandest and most unapologetic variety — a lush, sweeping chamber piece that moves in three-quarter time with the inevitability of a great tide coming in. The waltz form carries its historical weight deliberately here: this is music that knows it is romantic in the nineteenth-century sense, that knows it is old-fashioned, and refuses any ironic distance from that fact. The strings sing in a full-throated unison, the melodic line arching high before cascading back through registers with a kind of aching inevitability. There is choreography embedded in the rhythm — your body wants to sway with it, to turn — but the emotional undertow is too heavy for dancing. This is a waltz for ballrooms that exist only in memory, for loves that have the quality of historical artifacts, beautiful and slightly unreal. Korzeniowski wrote it for a film about a woman who finds her personal story mirrored in the tragic romance of Wallis Simpson, and the music carries that dual sense of the glamorous and the irrevocably lost. It belongs in candlelit rooms, in late autumn, at the turn of a season.
medium
2010s
lush, sweeping, rich
Polish-European, nineteenth-century romantic tradition
Classical, Film Score. Romantic chamber waltz. romantic, nostalgic. Sweeps from lush romantic grandeur into an aching sense of irrevocable loss, beautiful and slightly unreal throughout.. energy 5. medium. danceability 5. valence 5. vocals: instrumental, no vocals. production: full string ensemble, chamber orchestra, sweeping and unapologetically lush. texture: lush, sweeping, rich. acousticness 8. era: 2010s. Polish-European, nineteenth-century romantic tradition. Candlelit rooms in late autumn, at the turn of a season, recalling loves that feel like historical artifacts.