• Duration: 10
• Instrumentation: A solo-coro femminile-3232-4030-batt (3esec) cel 2ar pf-archi
• Year: 1917, 1924
• Words: Zofia Szymanowska
• Language of text: pol
• Type: parts, score

Cantata Demeter was composed in summer of 1917, finished in 1924, grew out of the composers interest in Ancient Word. It is a setting of text written at the composers request by his sister Zofia Szymanowska. Szymanowski wrote in 1932 to Universal Edition: ''...it is a sort of cantata [...] and, if it is not strictly church music, its nature is still serious and religious (a Greek Stabat Mater as it were)''. In her poem Zofia Szymanowska adopted motives taken from the Eleusian mysteries: plaintive laments of mother searching for her lost daughter. The formal expressive aspects of the music of the composition is strictly subordinated to the poetic text. In particular the solo vocal part consists of a faithful reproduction of poetic recitation. It retains the ictuses and rhythm of the poem, and a syllabic style prevails almost throughout. The composer's keen insight into the content of the poem, its semantic layer, caused the syntactic structure of the poetic text to become basic of division into melodic phrases, and this is demonstrated particulary well in the section with run-on lines of the poem. The uniformity of mood in the poem, melancholy and tragic, found expression in the music. None the less the extensive use of metaphors in the text prompted Szymanowski to the illustrative handling of certain passages and, as a result, to the differentiation of particular sections of the composition by the means of changing texture and instrumentation. (Zofia Helman, based on the preface to Szymanowski Complete Edition volume 4)