Last score for ‘menacing music’ composer
Krzysztof Penderecki, an awardwinning conductor and one of the world’s most popular contemporary classical music composers, whose works have featured in Hollywood films like “The Shining” and “Shutter Island,” died at his Krakow home in Poland last week. He was 86.
The Ludwig van Beethoven Association said in a statement that Penderecki had a “long and serious illness.” It called Penderecki as “Great Pole, an outstanding creator and a humanist” who was one of the world’s best appreciated Polish composers. The association was founded by Penderecki’s wife, Elzbieta Penderecka, and the communique was signed by its head, Andrzej Giza.
Penderecki was best known for his monumental compositions for orchestra and choir, like “St Luke Passion” and “Seven Gates of Jerusalem,” though his range was much wider. Rock fans know him from his work with Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood.
A violinist and a committed educator, he built a music center across the road from his home in southern Poland, where young virtuosos have the chance to learn from and play with world-famous masters.
Culture Minister Piotr Glinski tweeted that “Poland’s culture has suffered a huge and irreparable loss,” and that Penderecki was the nation’s “most outstanding contemporary composer whose music could be heard around the globe, from Japan to the United States.”
“A warm and good person,” Glinski said in his tweet.
Penderecki’s international career began at 25, when he won all three top prizes in a young composers’ competition in Warsaw in 1959 — writing one score with his right hand, one with his left and asking a friend to copy out the third score so that the handwriting wouldn’t reveal they were all by the same person.
He would go on to win many awards, including multiple Grammys, but the first prize he won was especially precious: It took him to a music course in Germany, at a time when Poles couldn’t freely travel abroad.
In the late 1950s and the 1960s, Penderecki experimented with avantgarde forms and sound, technique and unconventional instruments, using magnetic tape and even typewriters. He was largely inspired by electronic instruments at the Polish Radio Experimental Studio, which opened in Warsaw in 1957 and was where he composed.
“In my works the most important is the form, and it must serve the purpose,” Penderecki said in a 2015 interview.
He said he begins composing with a “graphic sketch of the entire work and then I fill in the white spaces,” he said.
His 1960 “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima” won him a UNESCO prize. Written for 52 string instruments, it can be described as a massive plaintive scream.
In the 1970s, believing that avantgarde had been explored to the full, Penderecki embarked on a new path, writing music that, to many, sounds romantic and has the traditional forms of symphonies, concertos, choral works and operas. A Catholic altar boy who grew up in a predominantly Jewish environment, he was largely inspired by religious texts: Catholic, Christian Orthodox and Jewish.
But his first opera, the 1969 “Devils of Loudun,” based on a novel by Aldous Huxley about the Inquisition, put him at odds with the Vatican, which called on him to stop the performances. He refused.
Penderecki wrote music for various historical celebrations, and conducted around the world. Among the works are the 1966 “St Luke Passion,” commissioned by West German Radio to celebrate the 700th anniversary of the Muenster Cathedral, and the 1996 “Seven Gates of Jerusalem” to mark 3,000 years of the titular city.
In 1967, he composed a major choral work, “Dies Irae,” known also as the “Auschwitz Oratorio,” in homage to the Holocaust victims.
His second opera, “Paradise Lost,” based on the John Milton poem, seemed to reconcile him with the Catholic Church, and in 1979, he conducted a concert at the Vatican for Polish-born Pope John Paul II.
Penderecki wrote for virtuosos and friends like violinists Isaak Stern and Anne-Sophie Mutter and cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. In 2012, he recorded an album with Greenwood, Radiohead’s guitarist.
“Because of the complexity of what’s happening — particularly in pieces such as ‘Threnody’ and ‘Polymorphia,’ and how the sounds are bouncing around the concert hall, it becomes a very beautiful experience when you’re there,” Greenwood said in a 2012 interview with The Guardian.
Penderecki said at the time that Greenwood is a “very interesting composer” and that working with the guitarist made him see his own music from a new perspective.
Penderecki’s rich, powerful, sometimes menacing music, especially in his early works, was used in Hollywood movies including Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining,” Martin Scorsese’s “Shutter Island,” David Lynch’s “Inland Empire” and William Friedkin’s “The Exorcist.”
But Penderecki said his “greatest fascination in life” was not music — it was trees. Around his manor house, he arranged a scenic arboretum featuring the various kinds of trees and plants that he brought from the most distant corners of the world where his music was played.
“It takes generations to plant a garden,” he once said. “I will do it over some 40 years, but this garden is like an unfinished symphony. Something can always be changed, you can always add new trees, find new species.”
Although he was a recluse, he liked to write music on a Baltic Sea beach in Jastrzebia Gora with his close family near him.
Penderecki was born on November 23, 1933, in the southern Polish town of Debica. His maternal grandfather was German and his grandmother was Armenian. His father, a lawyer, loved to play the violin and instilled in his son a love of music.
Penderecki studied violin and composition at the Krakow Conservatory, where on graduation in 1958 he was appointed a professor, and next a rector. From 1972 to 1978, he also taught at the Yale University School of Music.
Penderecki won a number of Grammy Awards during the course of his career. The Recording Academy awarded him the special merit National Trustees Award in 1968. In 1988, he won a Grammy for the recording of his Concerto No. 2 for Cello, with Rostropovich. Two more came 11 years later, for his Violin Concerto No. 2, “Metamorphosen,” written for and performed by Mutter, with Penderecki conducting. Most recently, a Grammy for best choral performance came in 2017 in recognition of the “Penderecki Conducts Penderecki” album.
He is survived by his second wife, Elzbieta, who as a girl was a piano student of his first wife Barbara, and by daughters Beata and Dominika and son Lukasz.
His ashes will be buried in the National Pantheon, the crypt of Krakow’s St Peter and Paul Church, according to the head of the pantheon’s foundation.
(AP)