This article examines Marek Czerniewicz’s Haiku (1998), a cycle of fourteen miniatures for soprano and chamber orchestra, drawing on Bashō’s poems in Agnieszka Żuławska-Umeda’s Polish translation. The analysis is based on the manuscript score, supplemented by an audio recording of the work’s 1998 premiere. Three aspects of the cycle are considered. First, its formal type: nearly all songs are through-composed, and their construction is shown to follow a consistent tripartite model — introduction, development, and conclusion — in which the vocal, text-bearing part is centrally embedded within a framework of instrumental outer sections, echoing a classical rhetorical scheme. Second, the composer’s selection and ordering of texts: although only the opening song is explicitly marked with a season, the texts are shown to follow a deliberate succession of the four seasons, beginning with summer and ending in spring, occasionally adapted by the composer to fit his own, European cultural frame of reference rather than the Japanese source context. Third, the word-music relationship: Czerniewicz is shown to treat the haiku texts directly and illustratively, favouring immediate musical depiction of natural imagery — flora, fauna, weather phenomena — over any attempt to reproduce the structural or aesthetic conventions of the haiku genre itself, including its characteristic emotional restraint. The study concludes that Czerniewicz’s cycle represents a distinctly Europeanised reading of haiku, in which nature functions as the primary object of musical illustration.
