Adam Mickiewicz's Konrad Wallenrod: A Musicoliterary Agon of Identities

The central scene of Adam Mickiewicz’s historic taleKonrad Wallenrod[Konrad Wallenrod](canto IV) is, diegetically speaking, a singing contest. Its poetic presentation is deeply anchoredin Homeric, Pauline, and Troubadour traditions of agon intended both as musicopoetic rivalryand as spiritual struggle. What is at stake here are identities: Konrad-Alf’s national/moralidentity 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 overtand covert musical genetic self-identifications, which make up for the text’s self-presentationas a song to be “sung in the tender reader’s soul” (VI,in fine). The division of the work intomusical numbers, with a variety of genres represented (hymn, different types of song, tale, ballad),is notoriously ignored. Critics take such musicalparatextesas mere signs of historical convention,taking Mickiewiczian “singing” to be a dead metaphor for “storytelling in verse”, sometimes goingso far as to misread or misquote the last lines of the source text. The present paper challengesthis common anti-musical interpretation, thus shedding new light on Wallenrod’s contest ballad“Alpuhara” [“Alpuhara”] and its disturbing musical shape.