- His stage works include the ballets Harnasie and Mandragora and the operas Hagith and King Roger.
- On 16 November 2006 the Polish Parliament passed a resolution to name 2007 "The Year of Karol Szymanowski" to honour the 125th anniversary of his birth and the 70th anniversary of his death.
- Szymanowski inspired the character of composer Edgar Szyller in Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz's novel Fame and Glory.
- Szymanowski's music has received international recognition. In the 1920s and the 1930s, his music proved immensely popular. His works were performed throughout the world by soloists such as Artur Rubinstein, Harry Neuhaus, Robert Casadesus, Pawel Kochanski, Bronislaw Huberman, Joseph Szigeti, and Jacques Thibaud, and by orchestras led by conductors including Emil Mlynarski, Albert Coates, Pierre Monteux, Philippe Gaubert, Leopold Stokowski, and Willem Mengelberg.
- He wrote much piano music, including the four Études, Op. 4 (of which No. 3 was once his most popular piece), many mazurkas and Métopes. Other works include the Three Myths for violin and piano, Nocturne and Tarantella, two string quartets, a sonata for violin and piano, a number of orchestral songs (some to texts by Hafiz and James Joyce) and his Stabat Mater.
- Szymanowski's long correspondence with the pianist Jan Smeterlin, a significant champion of his piano works, was published in 1969.
- Szymanowski was influenced by the music of Richard Wagner, Richard Strauss, Max Reger, Alexander Scriabin and the impressionism of Claude Debussy, and Maurice Ravel.
- English conductor Sir Simon Rattle has called Szymanowski "one of the greatest composers of the 20th century" and produced a series of recordings with the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.
- Szymanowski was awarded the highest national honors, including the Officer's Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta, the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland and other distinctions, both Polish and foreign.
- In the past two decades, Szymanowski's music has enjoyed a revival and been performed around the world. It has been recorded by conductors and musicians such as Pierre Boulez, Edward Gardner, Vladimir Jurowski, Mark Elder and Krystian Zimerman.
- On 3 October 2007, the National Bank of Poland issued special commemorative coins depicting Szymanowski in the following denominations: zl 200, zl 10 zloty and zl 2.
- On 11 November 2018 to commemorate 100th anniversary of the regaining of Polish independence, President Andrzej Duda posthumously awarded Szymanowski and 24 other distinguished Poles Poland's highest decoration, the Order of the White Eagle.
- Aleksander Laskowski has said of Szymanowski's music and its changing style: "He invented a musical language. His works were true and ingenious creations. And his oeuvre shows an incredible development from the Straussian and Wagnerian, through an interesting and very romantic Oriental period, and finishing with a national period influenced by his time in the Tatras.".
- He was a Polish composer and pianist and he was a member of the modernist Young Poland movement that flourished in the late 19th and early 20th century.
- Szymanowski's early works show the influence of the late Romantic German school as well as the early works of Alexander Scriabin, as exemplified by his Étude Op. 4 No. 3 and his first two symphonies.
- He was also a Doctor Honoris Causa of the Jagiellonian University, Kraków and an honorary member of the Czech Academy of Learning, the Latvian Conservatory of Music in Riga, the St Cecilia Royal Academy in Rome, the Royal Academy of Music in Belgrade, and the International Society for Contemporary Music.
- He was also significantly influenced by his countryman Frédéric Chopin and by Polish folk music. Like Chopin, he wrote a number of mazurkas for piano. He was specifically influenced by the folk music of the Polish Highlanders, which he discovered in Zakopane in the southern Tatra highlands. He wrote in his article "About Goral Music": "My discovery of the essential beauty of Goral music, dance and architecture is a very personal one; much of this beauty I have absorbed into my innermost soul". According to Jim Samson, it is "played on two fiddles and a string bass" and "has uniquely 'exotic' characteristics, highly dissonant and with fascinating heterophonic effects".
- The Karol Szymanowski Academy of Music in Katowice and the Kraków Philharmonic are both named for him.
- In 2004, Scottish violinist Nicola Benedetti won the BBC Young Musician of the Year with a performance of Szymanowski's Violin Concerto No. 1.
- Among Szymanowski's better-known orchestral works are four symphonies (including No. 3, Song of the Night, with choir and vocal soloists, and No. 4, Symphonie Concertante, with piano concertante) and two violin concertos.
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