Mieczysław Karłowicz was a Polish composer and conductor, as well as an avid mountaineer, photographer, and publicist. He was born on 11 December 1876 in the village of Vishneva, in the Smarhon District. He was the son of Irena Sulistrowska and Jan Aleksander Karłowicz, a Belarusian ethnologist and linguist.
In 1882, the Karłowicz family sold its property and moved first to Heidelberg, then to Prague and Dresden, before settling permanently in Warsaw in 1887. Karłowicz studied violin from childhood. In Warsaw he studied harmony and counterpoint with Zygmunt Noskowski, and began his first attempts at composition. Alongside his musical studies, he studied natural sciences at the University of Warsaw and later philosophy in Berlin.
In 1903, he founded a string orchestra within the Stanisław Moniuszko Warsaw Music Society. Several of his symphonic works, notably Everlasting Songs and the Lithuanian Rhapsody, drew upon Belarusian folk songs. His principal compositions include 25 songs for voice and piano; the Serenade in C major for string orchestra, Op. 2; music for Józef Nowiński's drama The White Dove, Op. 6; the Symphony in E minor, Rebirth, Op. 7; and the Violin Concerto in A major, Op. 8.
His six symphonic poems were Returning Waves, Op. 9; Everlasting Songs, Op. 10, a triptych comprising “Song of Eternal Longing,” “Song of Love and Death,” and “Song of Eternal Being”; Lithuanian Rhapsody, Op. 11; Stanisław and Anna Oświęcim, Op. 12; A Sorrowful Tale (Preludes to Eternity), Op. 13; and An Episode at a Masquerade, Op. 14, completed by Grzegorz Fitelberg. Most of Karłowicz's autograph manuscripts were destroyed during the Second World War.
Karłowicz first visited the Tatras in 1889 and established the first tourist route in the Western Tatras near the Glade on the Tables in 1892. He moved to the mountain resort of Zakopane in 1907, became a mountaineer, and was among the pioneers of skiing. He died in an avalanche during a mountain expedition in the High Tatras on 8 February 1909, aged 32, and was buried at the Powązki Cemetery in Warsaw. The Mieczysław Karłowicz Philharmonic in Szczecin is named in his honor.