Krzysztof Penderecki, Polish composer, dies at 86
KRZYSZTOF Penderecki, a composer and conductor whose music evoked religious wonder, apocalyptic terror and the tumultuous history of his native Poland with an emotional intensity that made him a favorite of rock musicians and filmmakers, died March 29 in Krakow, Poland. He was 86.
His death was announced by the Ludwig van Beethoven Association, a Polish music organization founded by his wife, Elzbieta. The organization did not give a specific cause, citing only “a long and serious illness.”
Penderecki (his name was pronounced KSHISH-toff penduh-RETS-key) was one of the world’s preeminent composers, known for writing musical lamentations inspired by World War II, the Holocaust, the Polish anti-communist movement and Old Testament religious texts that reflected his Catholic upbringing.
Although he spent much of his career writing music under the yoke of communism, he emerged on the international scene in the 1960s as a bracingly original talent, composing choral and orchestral works that featured quarter tones, indeterminate pitches, rapid glissandi and eerie knocks, shrieks, whistles and sirens. Some of his scores did not specify specific notes; others instructed string musicians to slap their instruments or play behind the bridge.
Penderecki also wrote operas, symphonies and chamber pieces, developing a more familiar sound that harked back to music’s romantic era. While he admired modernists such as Olivier Messiaen, his tastes as a listener extended back to Strauss and Bach; in his hands, old forms and musical attitudes became new again.
Some critics and fellow composers accused him of selling out, capitalizing on emerging trends in classical music. But Penderecki insisted he was simply searching for new ways to grapple with old themes - history, faith, human suffering - and maintained a devoted following while spending some nine months each year traveling the world, promoting his music and conducting major orchestras.
“Mr. Penderecki . . . is currently our most skillful purveyor of anxiety, foreboding and depression,” New York Times music critic Bernard Holland wrote in 1986, reviewing a concert featuring a Penderecki cello concerto and orchestral work, “The Dream of Jacob.” “So acute is his ear for orchestral sound and so clever his manipulation of it that wood, metal and string take on an anthropomorphic quality. Listening to this music was like being lectured to by a grand, richly modulated voice on the follies of optimism and joy.”
Raised in southeastern Poland, Penderecki watched from his window as Nazi soldiers hanged resistance fighters and rounded up Jews during World War II. He drew on his childhood memories for works, including “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima” (1960), a harrowing shriek of 52 strings, and “Dies Irae” (1967), a choral piece dedicated to the victims of the Auschwitz death camp, which stood roughly 100 miles west of his hometown.
While writing “Polymorphia” (1961), he wired psychiatric patients to electroencephalogram machines and then played a recording of “Threnody,” translating their brain waves into new contours of sound, according to Britain’s Guardian newspaper. Another early work, “St. Luke Passion” (1966), was an atonal setting of the Passion story, and a rare religious work in Poland at a time when the state was officially atheist.
Penderecki’s unconventional techniques and focus on timbre and texture made him a leading influence for musicians such as Jonny Greenwood, a composer and guitarist for the band Radiohead who collaborated with Penderecki on a 2012 album.
In an interview with The Times that year, Greenwood recalled attending a Penderecki concert in which the composer seemed to elicit electronic sounds from traditional instruments. “I thought there were speakers in the room. It was just strings,” he said. “But I could hear these kind of buzzings and rumblings, and I was like, ‘Where is this all coming from?’ And that was just better, to my ears. Odder, stranger, more magical.”
Penderecki’s otherworldly sounds cropped up repeatedly in moody dramas and horror films, including in William Friedkin’s “The Exorcist” (1973), Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining” (1980), Alfonso Cuarón’s “Children of Men” (2006) and Martin Scorsese’s “Shutter Island” (2010). In 2017, “Threnody” soundtracked a nuclear-blast sequence in David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks” reboot.
The composition was among Penderecki’s best-known works and established his international reputation after it won a UNESCO music award. It was originally known as “8’37”,” a reference to its length, before being renamed in honor of the Japanese victims of the first wartime atomic bombing.
By the end of the 1970s, Penderecki was turning toward more traditional melodic sounds, which came to the fore in his opera “Paradise Lost” (1978), adapted from Milton’s epic poems, and in “Polish Requiem,” first assembled in the early 1980s before being substantially revised over the next two decades.
Sections of the requiem commemorated victims of the Warsaw Uprising and the country’s bloody 1970 general strikes, among other episodes from Polish history.
Penderecki wrote his seventh symphony, “Seven Gates of Jerusalem” (1997), to commemorate the city’s third millennium. The work was unabashedly romantic, yet featured some experimental touches typical of his earlier compositions – including, the Chicago Tribune noted, “a prominent part for ‘tubaphone’ – batteries of plastic tubes whose openings have been fitted with felt-covered fly swatters.”
“I no longer ask myself, ‘Is this music different or original?’ “Penderecki told The New Times shortly before completing the symphony. “So many new things have been discovered in the 20th century that now, at the end of the century, we need some kind of synthesis, some musical language which will allow us just to write music. We live in a decadent time, because in the arts there is absolutely nothing new happening.
“It’s not a period of discovery. It’s no longer possible to find something which will shock other people, because everything has already been done.”