Szymanowski, the cosmopolitan wanderer and "good European," returned to a newly independent Poland on Christmas Eve 1919, followed by a change of heart and, soon after, by a radical change of style. Through the 1920s, Szymanowski shuttled between Warsaw, Paris, and Zakopane in the Tatra mountains. Of Bartek Obrochta, patriarch of a family of Zakopane musicians, writer Mieczyslaw Rytard recalls that, "Szymanowski was very much taken with that delightful, frail old mountaineer. Snow-haired, spry Bartek, always bright and witty, a marvelous teller of old folk tales, was one of the few surviving specimens of the old breed of Tatra highlanders. He had a quick wit and intelligence, but he intrigued Szymanowski mainly as a first-rate musician....What music it was! Karol strolled around the large room, with his inevitable cigarette holder, chain smoking; he listened, he watched the players' fingers, he cocked an ear for the more interesting, original passages, he soaked in the strange, primitive melodies, dissecting them into their component parts." Slopiewnie (1921), the first work in the new idiom, matched poet Julian Tuwim's brilliantly imagined proto-Slavic language with Tatra-inspired music of sophisticated primitivism. Through such works as the Mazurkas (1924-1925), the Stabat Mater (1925-1926), and—above all—the ballet Harnasie (1923-1931), the new style became less esoteric, if more laconic, attaining its final, most allusively polished form in the Violin Concerto No. 2. Sketched over August 1932 at the insistence of his friend, violinist Pawel Kochanski—who provided (as he had for the Violin Concerto No. 1) the cadenza—Szymanowski could not begin the orchestration until March, completing the full score on September 6, 1933. Weak from tuberculosis, Szymanowski was easily exhausted, and this was his last large-scale work.

No less cunning than the Violin Concerto No. 1 in terms of motivic unity and continuous development, the work opens with a berceuse-like exposition of several melodic oddments evoking a sort of primal ethnic nostalgia, gyrating slowly, hypnotically within the interval of a third and alternating beguilingly between major and minor. A second, more animated thematic group enacts a plein air dance and march leading to an extensive cadenza ranging histrionically but brilliantly over both moods while marking the work's mid-point. The opening themes, combined with more adventurous melodic material traversing a tenth, amplify the play of dreaming wakened by raucous celebration, becoming grander and more eldritch by turns, led by bursts of something like dissonantly rustic fiddling to a high-kicking apotheosis.

If one characterizes Szymanowski's last manner as a sophisticated primitivism, it is nevertheless a curious fact that few performances embrace both aspects. In general, Polish artists respond to the folk elements with the gusto of a highland hoe-down, while Western European and American musicians play suavely to the glowing orchestral timbres familiar from Debussy and Ravel. Both are effective, but which is Szymanowski? One suspects he died undecided. The premiere was given in Warsaw on October 6, 1933, by two of the composer's closest friends, Kochanski as soloist with Grzegorz Fitelberg conducting.

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