Polish Radio Symphonic Orchestra Katowice directed by W. Lutoslawski and J.
Krenz,
Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra directed by W. Rowicki
The Silesian Philharmonic Choir
The Polish Radio Choir in Cracow
Recorded:
1959, 1962,1964,1968, and 1988 in Katowice & Warsaw, Poland
About:
Witold Lutoslawski ( January 25, 1913 – February 7, 1994) was one of the
major European composers of the 20th century. He was possibly the most
significant Polish composer after Chopin, and was one of the pre-eminent
musicians of his country during the last three decades of the century. During
his lifetime he earned a large number of international awards and prizes,
including the Order of the White Eagle, Poland's highest honour.
Lutoslawski studied piano and composition in Warsaw, and his early works were
overtly influenced by Polish folk music. His style demonstrates a wide range of
rich atmospheric textures. He began to develop his own characteristic
composition techniques in the late 1950s. His music from this period onwards
incorporates his own methods of building harmonies from a small group of musical
intervals. It also exhibits aleatory processes, in which the rhythmic
coordination of parts is subject to an element of chance. His works (of which he
was a notable conductor) include four symphonies, a Concerto for Orchestra, and
several concertos and song cycles.
During World War II, Lutoslawski made a living by playing the piano in Warsaw
bars. For a time after the war, Stalinist authorities banned his compositions
for being "formalist"— accessible only to the elite. In the 1980s, Lutoslawski
used his stature to support the Solidarity movement, which won the 1989
legislative election and broke the Soviet hold over Poland.
Family and early years
Lutoslawski's parents were both born into the Polish landed gentry. His
family owned estates in the area of Drozdowo. His father Jozef was involved in
the Polish National Democratic Party (Endecja), and the Lutoslawski family
became intimate with its founder, Roman Dmowski (Witold Lutoslawski's middle
name was Roman). Until World War I, Poland was divided according to the 1815
Congress of Vienna, and Warsaw was part of Tsarist Russia.
Jozef Lutoslawski studied in Zürich, where in 1904 he met and married a fellow
student, Maria Olszewska, who later became Lutoslawski's mother. Jozef pursued
his studies in London, where he acted as correspondent for the Endecja
newspaper, Gońca. He continued to be involved in National Democracy politics
after returning to Warsaw in 1905, and took over the management of the family
estates in 1909. After Jozef's death, when Lutoslawski was only five, other
members of the family played an important part in his early life. They included
Jozef's half-brother Wicenty Lutoslawski, a multilingual philosopher who used
literary analysis to establish the chronology of Plato's writings. Wicenty was
married to the Spanish poet Sophia Pérez Eguia y Casanova. Jozef's other
brothers were also members of the intelligentsia.
Witold Roman Lutoslawski was born in Warsaw shortly before the outbreak of World
War I. In 1915, with Russia at war with Germany, Prussian forces drove towards
Warsaw. The Lutoslawskis fled east to Moscow, where Jozef remained politically
active, organising Polish Legions ready for any action that might liberate
Poland. Dmowski's strategy was for Imperial Russia to guarantee security for a
new Polish state. However, in 1917, the February Revolution forced the Tsar to
abdicate, and the October Revolution started a new Soviet government that made
peace with Germany. Jozef's activities were now in conflict with the Bolsheviks,
who arrested him and his brother Marian. Thus, although fighting stopped on the
Eastern Front in 1917, the Lutoslawskis were prevented from returning home. The
brothers were sent to the notorious Butyrskaya prison in central Moscow, where
Lutoslawski—by then aged five—visited his father. Jozef and Marian were executed
by a firing squad in September 1918, without trial.
After the war, the family returned to Warsaw, capital of the newly independent
Second Polish Republic, only to find their estates ruined. Lutoslawski started
piano lessons for two years from the age of six. In the Polish-Soviet War,
however, Drozdowo again came into the firing line, and after a few years of
running the estates with limited success, his mother returned to Warsaw. In 1924
Lutoslawski entered secondary school while continuing piano lessons. A
performance of Karol Szymanowski's Third Symphony deeply affected him. In 1926
he started violin lessons, and in 1927 as a part-time student he entered the
Warsaw Conservatory where Szymanowski was both professor and director. He
started to compose, but could not manage both his school and conservatory
studies, and so discontinued the latter. In 1931 he enrolled at Warsaw
University to study mathematics, and formally entered composition classes at the
Conservatory. His teacher was Witold Maliszewski, a pupil of Nikolai
Rimsky-Korsakov. He was given a strong grounding in musical structures,
particularly movements in sonata form. In 1933 he gave up his mathematics and
violin studies to concentrate on piano and composition. He gained a diploma for
piano performance from the Conservatory in 1936, after presenting a virtuoso
program including Schumann's Toccata and Beethoven's fourth piano concerto. His
diploma for composition was awarded by the same institution in 1937.
World War II
Military service followed—Lutoslawski was trained in signalling and radio
operating. Although he had intended to travel to Paris for further musical
study, in September 1939, Germany invaded western Poland and Russia invaded
eastern Poland. Lutoslawski was mobilised with the radio unit at Krakow, and was
soon captured by German soldiers, but escaped while being marched to prison
camp, and walked 400 km back to Warsaw. Lutoslawski's brother was captured by
Russian soldiers, and later died in a labour camp.
To earn a living, Lutoslawski joined a cabaret group playing popular dances. He
also formed a piano duo with friend and fellow composer Andrzej Panufnik, and
they performed together in Warsaw bars. Their repertoire consisted of a wide
range of music in their own arrangements, including the first incarnation of
Lutoslawski's Paganini Variations, a highly original transformation of the
original 24th Caprice for solo violin by Niccolò Paganini. Defiantly, they even
sometimes played banned Polish music. Listening in cafés was the only way in
which the Poles of German-occupied Warsaw could hear live music; putting on
concerts was impossible since the occupying forces prohibited all organised
gatherings. (Panufnik 1987)
Lutoslawski's mother had been in East Poland at the outbreak of the war, but was
spirited to Warsaw by friends. Lutoslawski left Warsaw with his mother just
before the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, salvaging only a few scores and sketches
—the rest of his music was lost during the destruction of the city, as were the
family's Drozdowo estates. Of the 200 or so arrangements that Lutoslawski and
Panufnik had worked on for their piano duo, only Lutoslawski's Paganini
Variations survived. Lutoslawski returned to the ruins of Warsaw after the
Polish-Soviet treaty in April.
Postwar years
During the postwar years, Lutoslawski worked on his first symphony—sketches
of which he had salvaged from Warsaw—which was first performed in 1948. To
provide for his family, he also composed music that he termed functional, such
as the Warsaw Suite (written to accompany a silent film depicting the city's
reconstruction), sets of Polish Carols, and the study pieces for piano, Melodie
Ludowe ("Folk Melodies").
In 1945, Lutoslawski was elected as secretary and treasurer of the newly
constituted Union of Polish Composers (ZKP—Związek Kompozytorow Polskich). In
1946, he married Maria Danuta Boguslawska, an architecture student. Lutoslawski
had met her brother, the writer Stanislaw Dygat, before the war, and both
Stanislaw and Maria had listened to the piano duo performances during the war.
The marriage was a lasting one, and Maria's drafting skills were of great value
to the composer: she became his copyist, and solved some of the notational
challenges of his later works.
In 1947, the Stalinist political climate led to the suppression by the ruling
Polish United Workers' Party of music in a specifically Polish idiom, including
the music of Chopin. This artistic censorship, which ultimately came from Stalin
personally, was to some degree prevalent over the whole Eastern bloc, and was
reinforced by the 1948 Zhdanov decree. Composers were required to write music
following the principles of Socialist realism. By 1948, the ZKP was taken over
by musicians willing to follow the party line on musical matters, and
Lutoslawski was dropped from the committee. He was implacably opposed to the
ideas of Socialist realism. His First Symphony was proscribed as "formalist",
and he found himself shunned by the Soviet authorities, a situation that
continued throughout the era of Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko. In
1954, the climate of musical oppression drove his friend Andrzej Panufnik to
defect to the United Kingdom. Against this background, he was happy to compose
pieces for which there was social need, but in 1954 this earned Lutoslawski—much
to the composer's chagrin—the Prime Minister's Prize, for a set of children's
songs. As he commented, "… it was for those functional compositions of mine that
the authorities decorated me … I realised that I was not writing indifferent
little pieces, only to make a living, but was carrying on an artistic creative
activity in the eyes of the outside world." (Varga 1976).
It was his substantial and original Concerto for Orchestra of 1954 that
established Lutoslawski as an important composer of art music. The work earned
the composer two state prizes in the following year.
Maturity
Stalin's death in 1953 allowed a certain relaxation of the cultural
totalitarianism in Russia and its satellite states. By 1956, political events
had led to a partial thawing of the musical climate, and the Warsaw Autumn
Festival of Contemporary Music was founded. Originally intended to be a biennial
festival, it has been held annually ever since 1958 (except under Martial law in
1982 when, in protest, the ZKP refused to organise it). The year 1958 saw the
first performance of his Muzyka żalobna (Musique funèbre, or "Music of
mourning"), written to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the death of Béla
Bartok; this work brought international recognition, the annual ZKP prize and
the UNESCO prize in 1959. This work, together with the Five songs of 1956–57,
saw the significant development of Lutoslawski's harmonic and contrapuntal
thinking by introducing the twelve-note system that he had developed. He hit on
another feature of his compositional technique, which became a Lutoslawski
signature, when he began introducing randomness into the exact synchronisation
of various parts of the musical ensemble in Jeux vénitiens ("Venetian games").
These harmonic and temporal techniques became part of every subsequent work, and
integral to his style.
In a departure from his usually serious compositions, the years 1957–63 saw
Lutoslawski also composing light music under the pseudonym Derwid. Mostly
waltzes, tangos, foxtrots and slow-foxtrots for voice and piano, these pieces
are in the genre of Polish actors' songs. Their place in Lutoslawski's output
may be seen as less incongruous given his own performances of cabaret music
during the war, and in the light of his relationship by marriage to the famous
Polish cabaret singer Kalina Jędrusik (who was his wife's sister-in-law).
In 1963, Lutoslawski fulfilled a commission for the Zagreb music Biennale, his
Trois poèmes d'Henri Michaux for chorus and orchestra. It was the first work he
had written for a commission from abroad, and brought him further international
acclaim. It earned him a second State Prize for music (there was no cynicism
towards the award this time), and Lutoslawski gained an agreement for the
international publication of his music with Chester Music, then part of the
Hansen publishing house.
With his String Quartet (1964), Lutoslawski (or rather his wife, Danuta) solved
the problem of how to notate his requirement for a lack of synchronicity between
the parts. Originally Lutoslawski produced only the four instrumental parts,
refusing to bind them in a full score, because he was concerned that this would
imply that he wanted notes in vertical alignment to coincide, as is the case
with conventionally notated classical ensemble music. Danuta solved this by
cutting up the parts and sticking them together in boxes (which Lutoslawski
called mobiles), with instructions on how to signal in performance when all of
the players should proceed to the next mobile. In his orchestral music, these
problems were not to so difficult, because the instructions on how and when to
proceed are given by the conductor.
The String Quartet was first performed in Stockholm in 1965, followed the same
year by the first performance of his orchestral song-cycle Paroles tissées. This
shortened title was suggested by the poet Jean-François Chabrun, who had
originally published the poems as Quatre tapisseries pour la Châtelaine de Vergi.
The song cycle is dedicated to the tenor Peter Pears, who first performed it at
the 1965 Aldeburgh Festival with the composer conducting. The Aldeburgh Festival
was founded and organised by Benjamin Britten, with whom the composer formed a
lasting friendship.
Shortly after this, Lutoslawski started work on his Second Symphony, which had
two premieres: Pierre Boulez conducted the second movement, Direct, in 1966, and
when the first movement, Hésitant, was finished in 1967, the composer conducted
a complete performance in Katowice. The Second Symphony is very different from a
conventional classical symphony in structure, but Lutoslawski used all of his
technical innovations up to that point to build a large-scale, dramatic work
worthy of the name. In 1968, the work earned Lutoslawski first prize from
UNESCO's Tribune internationale des compositeurs, his third such award, which
confirmed his growing international reputation. In 1967 Lutoslawski had also
been awarded the Sonning Award, Denmark's highest musical honour.
International renown
The Second Symphony, the Livre pour orchestre, and the Cello Concerto which
followed, were composed during a particularly traumatic period in Lutoslawski’s
life. His mother died in 1967, and the period 1967–70 saw a great deal of unrest
in Poland. This sprang first from the suppression of the theatre production
Dziady, which sparked a summer of protests; later, in 1968, the use of Polish
troops to suppress the liberal reforms in Czechoslovakia's Prague Spring, and
the Gdańsk Shipyards strike of 1970—which led to a violent clampdown by the
authorities, both caused significant political and social tension in Poland.
Lutoslawski did not support the Soviet regime, and these events have been
postulated as reasons for the increase in antagonistic effects in his work,
particularly the Cello Concerto of 1968–70 for Rostropovich and the Royal
Philharmonic Society. Indeed, Rostropovich's own opposition to the Soviet regime
in Russia was just coming to a head (he shortly afterwards declared his support
for the dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn). Lutoslawski himself did not hold the
view that such influences had a direct effect on his music, although he
acknowledged that they impinged on his creative world to some degree. In any
case, the Cello Concerto was a great success, earning both Lutoslawski and
Rostropovich accolades.
In 1973, Lutoslawski attended a recital given by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and
Sviatoslav Richter in Warsaw; this inspired him to write his extended orchestral
song Les espaces du sommeil ("The spaces of sleep"). This work, Mi-Parti (a
French expression roughly translated as "divided into two equal but different
parts"), and a short piece for cello in honour of Paul Sacher's seventieth
birthday, continued to keep Lutoslawski busy, while in the background he was
working away at a projected third symphony and a concertante piece for the
oboist Heinz Holliger. These latter pieces were proving difficult to complete as
Lutoslawski struggled to introduce greater fluency into his sound world. The
Double Concerto for oboe, harp and chamber orchestra—commissioned by Paul Sacher—was
finally finished in 1980, and the Third Symphony in 1983.
During this time, Poland was undergoing yet more upheaval: in 1978, John Paul II
was elected Pope, providing a national figurehead of world importance; in 1980,
the influential group Solidarność was created, led by Lech Walęsa; and in 1981,
martial law was declared by General Wojciech Jaruzelski. From 1981–89,
Lutoslawski refused all professional engagements in Poland as a gesture of
solidarity with the artists' boycott. He refused to enter the Culture Ministry
to meet any of the ministers, and was careful not be photographed in their
company. In 1983, he sent a recording of the first performance (in Chicago) of
the Third Symphony to Gdańsk to be played to strikers in a local church, a
gesture of support understood by both sides. In 1983, he was awarded the
Solidarity prize, of which Lutoslawski was reported to be more proud than any
other of his honours.
The Third Symphony earned Lutoslawski the first Grawemeyer Prize from the
University of Louisville, Kentucky. The significance of the prize lay not just
in its prestige—other eminent nominations have included Elliott Carter and
Michael Tippett—but in the size of its financial award (then US$150,000). The
intention of the award is to remove recipients' financial concerns for a period
to allow them to concentrate on serious composition. In a gesture of altruism,
Lutoslawski announced that he would use the fund to set up a scholarship to
enable young Polish composers to study abroad; Lutoslawski also directed that
his fee from the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra for Chain 3 should go to this
scholarship fund.
Final years
Witold Lutoslawski in 1993.Through the mid-1980s Lutoslawski hit upon ways of
simplifying his style while retaining the freedoms he had gained in his
techniques to date. He composed three pieces called Lańcuch ("Chain"), which
refers to the way the music is constructed from contrasting strands which
overlap like the links of a chain. Chain 2 was written for Anne-Sophie Mutter
(commissioned by Paul Sacher), and for Mutter he also orchestrated his slightly
earlier Partita for violin and piano, providing a new linking Interlude, so that
when played together the Partita, Interlude and Chain 2 form his longest work.
In 1987 Lutoslawski was presented (by Michael Tippett) with the Royal
Philharmonic Society's Gold Medal during a concert in which Lutoslawski was
conducting his Third Symphony; also that year a major celebration of his work
was made at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. In addition, he was
awarded honorary doctorates at several universities worldwide, including
Cambridge. Lutoslawski was at this time writing his Piano Concerto for Krystian
Zimerman, commissioned by the Salzburg Festival. He had had plans to write a
piano concerto since 1938, being himself in his younger days a virtuoso pianist.
It was this work that marked the composer's return to the conductor's podium in
Poland in 1988, after substantive talks had been arranged between the government
and the opposition.
The monument to Witold Lutoslawski and his wife Danuta in Powązki
CemeteryLutoslawski also, around 1990, worked on a fourth symphony and his
orchestral song-cycle Chantefleurs et chantefables for soprano. The latter was
first performed at a Prom concert in London in 1991, and the Fourth Symphony in
1993 in Los Angeles. In between, and after initial reluctance, Lutoslawski took
on the presidency of the newly reconstituted Polish Cultural Council. This had
been set up after the reforms in 1989 in Poland brought about by the almost
total support for Solidarity in the elections of that year, and the subsequent
end of communist rule and the reinstatement of Poland as an independent republic
rather than the communist state of the People's Republic of Poland.
In 1993 Lutoslawski continued his busy schedule, traveling to England, Germany,
and Japan, and sketching a violin concerto, but by Christmas it was clear that
cancer had taken hold, and after an operation the composer weakened quickly and
died on February 7. He had, a few weeks before, been awarded Poland's highest
honour, the Order of the White Eagle (only the second person to receive this
since the collapse of communism in Poland — the first had been Pope John Paul
II). He was cremated; his devoted wife Danuta died shortly afterwards.
Witold Lutoslawski conducting.Lutoslawski described musical composition as a
search for listeners who think and feel the same way he did — he once called it
"fishing for souls".
Folk influence
Lutoslawski's works up until and including the Dance Preludes clearly show the
influence of Polish folk music, both harmonically and melodically. Part of his
art was to transform folk music, rather than quoting it exactly. In some cases,
folk music is unrecognisable as such without careful analysis, for example, in
the Concerto for Orchestra. As Lutoslawski developed the techniques of his
mature compositions, he stopped using folk material expicitly, although its
influence remained as subtle features until the end. As he said, "[in those
days] I could not compose as I wished, so I composed as I was able", and about
this change of direction he said, "I was simply not so interested in it [using
folk music]".
In Muzyka zalobna (Funeral Music) (1958) Lutoslawski introduced his own brand of
twelve-tone music, marking a departure from the explicit use of folk music. His
twelve-tone technique allowed him to build harmony and melody from specific
intervals (in Muzyka żalobna, augmented fourths and semitones). This system also
gave him the means to write the dense chords he wanted without resorting to tone
clusters, and enabled him to build towards these dense chords (which often
include all twelve notes of the chromatic scale) at climactic moments.
Lutoslawski's twelve-note techniques were thus completely different in
conception from Arnold Schoenberg's tone-row system, although Muzyka żalobna
does happen to be based on a tone row. The twelve-note intervallic technique had
its genesis in earlier works such as Concerto for Orchestra.
A page from the Third Symphony (1983). Although Muzyka żalobna was
internationally acclaimed, his new harmonic techniques led to something of a
crisis for Lutoslawski, during which he still could not see how to express his
musical ideas. Then he happened to hear some music by John Cage. Although he was
not influenced by the sound or the philosophy of Cage's music, Cage's
explorations of aleatory music set off a train of thought which resulted in
Lutoslawski finding a way to retain the harmonic structures he wanted while
introducing the freedom for which he was searching. His Three Postludes were
hastily rounded off (he originally intended to write four) and he moved on to
compose works in which he explored these new ideas.
In works from Jeux vénitiens, the parts of the ensemble are not to be
synchronized exactly. At cues from the conductor each instrumentalist may be
instructed to move straight on to the next section, to finish their current
section before moving on, or to stop. In this way the random element implied by
the term aleatory is carefully directed by the composer, who controls the
architecture and harmonic progression of the piece precisely. Lutoslawski
notated the music exactly, there is no improvisation, no choice of parts is
given to any instrumentalist, and there is thus no doubt about how the musical
performance is to be realized. The combination of Lutoslawski's aleatory
techniques and his harmonic discoveries allowed him to build up complex musical
textures.
The aleatoric style of Lutoslawski's mature period is clearly illustrated by the
excerpt from the score of his Third Symphony. Instead of printing every
instrumental part across the page whether sounding or not, here there is white
space when instruments are silent. The wind and brass instruments, on the top
half of the page, are each given a short fragment of music followed by a wavy
line; this indicates that they should each play their fragment again and again
in their own time, resulting in an atmospheric texture devoid of pulse and with
a cloud-like sense of melody and rhythm. After the brass and wind figuration is
established, the conductor gives four successive beats for the string section,
notated on the lower half of the page. At each beat (signified by a downward
arrow on the score) first the violins, then the violas, then the cellos and
finally the basses enter with downward motifs, themselves repeated and
unsynchronised apart from their entries. In some works of this period, this
controlled freedom given to the individual musicians is contrasted with sections
where the orchestra is asked to synchronise their parts conventionally, in
passages notated with a common time signature.
In his later works Lutoslawski evolved a more harmonically mobile, less
monumental style, in which less of the music is played with an ad libitum
coordination. This development resulted from the demands of his late chamber
works, such as Epitaph, Grave and Partita for just two instrumentalists; however
it may also be seen in orchestral works such as Piano Concerto, Chantefleurs et
Chantefables, and the Fourth Symphony, which require mostly conventional
coordination.
Lutoslawski's formidable technical developments grew out of his creative
imperative; that he left a lasting body of major compositions is a testament to
his resolution of purpose in the face of the anti-formalist authorities under
which he formulated his methods.
