Muzycznoliteracki agon tożsamości: „Konrad Wallenrod

The central scene of Adam Mickiewicz’s historic tale Konrad Wallenrod [Konrad Wallenrod](canto IV) is, diegetically speaking, a singing contest. Its poetic presentation is deeply anchored in Homeric, Pauline, and Troubadour traditions of agon intended both as musicopoetic rivalry and as spiritual struggle. What is at stake here are identities: Konrad-Alf’s national/moral identity on the one hand, and the poem’s medial identity (literary/musical) on the other. Walterscottian stylisation used here by Mickiewicz is typically taken to neutralise the text’s overt and covert musical genetic self-identifications, which make up for the text’s self-presentation as a song to be “sung in the tender reader’s soul” (VI, in fine). The division of the work into musical numbers, with a variety of genres represented (hymn, different types of song, tale, ballad), is notoriously ignored. Critics take such musical paratextes as mere signs of historical convention, taking Mickiewiczian “singing” to be a dead metaphor for “storytelling in verse”, sometimes going so far as to misread or misquote the last lines of the source text. The present paper challenges this common anti-musical interpretation, thus shedding new light on Wallenrod’s contest ballad “Alpuhara” [“Alpuhara”] and its disturbing musical shape.