Composer made haunting ‘Exorcist’ soundtrack
Krzysztof Penderecki, a Polish composer and conductor whose modernist works jumped from the concert hall to popular culture, turning up in soundtracks for films like The Exorcist and The Shining and influencing a generation of edgy rock musicians, died Sunday at his home in Krakow. He was 86.
Penderecki was regarded as Poland’s preeminent composer for more than half a century, and in all those years he never seemed to sit still. Beginning in the 1960s with radical ideas that placed him firmly in the avantgarde, he went on to produce dozens of compositions including eight symphonies, four operas, a requiem and other choral works, and several concertos he cheerfully described as being almost impossible to play.
Among those who could were violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter and cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, whose recordings of the concertos he wrote for them won Grammy Awards in 1999 and 1988, respectively.
Penderecki was most widely known for choral compositions evoking Poland’s ardent Catholicism and history of foreign domination, and for his early experimental works, with their massive tone clusters and disregard for melody and harmony. Those ideas would reverberate for decades after he himself had pronounced them “more destructive than constructive” and changed course toward neo-Romanticism.
(His decision to move on was partly political: The Polish avant-garde movement had created an unhealthy illusion of freedom in a country living under Communism, he said. But it was also artistic: Experimentation had reached an impasse, he told a Canadian interviewer in 1998, because “we discovered everything!”)
Still, it was compositions from the wild first decade of his career, including “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima” (1960), “Polymorphia” (1961) and the “St. Luke Passion” (1966) that brought him lasting international recognition while he was still a young man.
The threnody, in particular, is a much-studied example of startling emotional effects created from abstract concepts. Following a score that often looks more like geometry homework than conventional notation, it forces an ensemble of 52 string instruments to produce relentless, nerve-jangling sounds that can suggest nuclear annihilation. Yet it was said that Penderecki dedicated it to the victims of Hiroshima only after hearing the piece performed.
Though he wrote little expressly for movies, film directors picked up on Penderecki. His compositions could perfectly amplify scenes of dread, horror, murder and mayhem. His music can be heard in Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island, Peter Weir’s Fearless, David Lynch’s Wild at Heart and Inland Empire and, of course, Stanley Kubrick’s Shining and William Friedkin’s Exorcist.
Penderecki also appealed to many pop musicians. Artists as disparate as Kele Okereke of Bloc Party and Robbie Robertson of the Band professed to have been inspired by him. But his influence is most directly evident in the music of Jonny Greenwood, the classically trained guitarist of Radiohead.
Greenwood’s own score for the movie There Will Be Blood, for example, features his “Popcorn Superhet Receiver,” a work directly inspired by the Hiroshima threnody.
Whatever the form of Penderecki’s music, darkness was a constant. New York Times critic Bernard Holland, writing about a Carnegie Hall concert in 1986 with Penderecki leading his Krakow Philharmonic, called the composer “our most skillful purveyor of anxiety, foreboding and depression.”
Penderecki had as many commissions as he could handle, and enjoyed a lucrative overlapping career as conductor of the Krakow Symphony and frequent guest conductor abroad.
Besides his wife of more than 50 years, Elzbieta, he is survived by their children, Lukasz and Dominika, and a daughter from his first marriage, Beata.