In the winter of 1914, Szymanowski made his first visit to the Tatra highland resort of Zakopane, where he would spend his final years, and in the spring embarked, with his friend Stefan Spiess, on a tour of Sicily and North Africa—Algiers, Biskra, Tunis, Constantine—returning via Italy, Paris, and London. In London he met Stravinsky—"with whom I am on the way to a perfect understanding," he wrote Spiess—and had accepted an invitation to visit Paderewski in Switzerland when the Great War broke out. Returning instead to Tymoszówka by the last train, Szymanowski entered a period of splendid isolation in which the grip of Strauss- and Reger-indebted Germanic post-Romanticism yielded before a wealth of exotic impressions, memories of the remnants of Greek and Arabic culture lit by the Mediterranean sun, and the revelation of Stravinsky's ballets. A new and renewing prehension blossomed in the spate of Dionysian works—mystical, ecstatic, hallucinatory, erotic—constituting his most opulent period. The visionary Mythes, coveted by all violinists; the fantastical Violin Concerto No. 1; and the rapt Symphony No. 3 ("Song of the Night") and piano triptychs—sensuously glowing Métopes and sardonic Masques—all date from the inter-war years, with the 12 Études, Op. 33, taking shape with Masques in 1916.

With the longest playing under two minutes—and the entire set heard in less than 15—the Études possess the considerable interest of being an index to Szymanowski's expansive, rhapsodically Dionysian style in a distilled, crystallized, aphoristic form. Compact and exposed by the keyboard's black-and-white, the Dionysian oddments take on an acerbically manic mien, less scintillant or sensuous than flickering, coruscating, and frantic. A mood of Katzenjammer afflicts the languishing etudes (e.g., No. 2, Andantino soave, or No. 8, Lento assai mesto). Sarcasm embitters not only No. 9, Animato—marked Con brio, Burlesco—but also No. 10, Presto (Tempestoso) and No. 12, Presto. Composed in 1905, No. 5, Andante espressivo, is a misplaced curiosity. Taken together, the 12 Études, Op. 33, look ahead to Szymanowski's laconic, harmonically acidulous last manner.

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