The BBC Music Magazine Interview
Composer Krzysztof Penderecki talks to James Naughtie
Warsaw is celebrating the
85th birthday of Krzysztof Penderecki in a remarkable display of affection. his face peers from yellow posters on every lamppost, it seems, and a whole week of concerts has been dedicated to him.
‘I am content,’ he says to me when we sit down in Warsaw’s Philharmonic hall. No wonder. The whole affair has the character of a national salute to Poland’s leading composer, whose music has moved dramatically over the years from the electronic and avant garde to a more tonal style, and has become a favourite of screen directors. You get the flavour from the films that have used Penderecki’s compositions in their scores – The Exorcist, The Shining and the TV series Twin Peaks.a haunting quality marks much of his music and has survived those stylistic changes.
The point of the celebration is to present music from every period: Emanations, for example, from his early years, up to the Dies Illa, one of the last of his many sacred oratorios. The mastermind for all this wasn’t the composer himself, but his wife Elzbieta. ‘She did the whole programme. She didn’t ask me!’
It is she who, after the last concert in the festival, leads guests to a lavish banquet where we all sing (or try to) the Polish song that approximates to Happy Birthday.
This happens several times in the course of a dinner that doesn’t begin until nearly midnight and is still being interrupted with toasts some hours later. he beams happily throughout. In the course of our conversation I find him in a mood of contemplation and calm. ‘ I have a feeling of completion. It is very satisfying. I walk in my garden and I am happy.’
‘Garden’ is a misnomer. he’s talking about his arboretum about 60 miles from Krakow which has 1,700 different species of tree in grounds that stretch for 25 hectares (62 acres). he’s happiest there.
‘‘I go to my arboretum and put my arms round one of the big trees for a while. It is a hug. That gives me a feeling of power and peace’’ THE BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE INTERVIEW
‘I find it hard to describe. I go there, to the big trees and put my arms round one of them for a while. It is a hug. That gives me a feeling of power, and peace too.’
his grandfather, who was a forester, taught him the Latin names of trees on their long walks together, and for young Krzysztof that closeness to nature was profoundly important when his father, who was an amateur musician, sent him to Krakow to study. his talent was already obvious and he was starting to compose, almost instinctively. ‘My two greatest influences were JS Bach and Monteverdi. I listened to many others – Palestrina, for instance – but Monteverdi to me was the genius. I can hardly describe what I felt about his music. What he did was amazing.’
But it was in the electronic studio that Penderecki started to hone his own style, and was soon asking orchestras to do things they’d never thought of before – playing on the bridge of the violin, for example, and using old instruments to make new sounds that no one had heard in a concert hall before. By the time he produced Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima in 1960, for an orchestra of 52 strings, he was happily riding a wave of experimentation.
‘For me I was using the elements of different music – always in a form in which I was very much connected to the tradition, although the sounds were different. This was revolutionary, certainly, but only in a small way. Maybe two steps forward, no more than that. But I was taking the steps, and that was important. I was inventing new sounds – using old instruments to make them, particularly stringed instruments because I was a string player.’
And these are the instruments for which he’s always written with the greatest enthusiasm. The First Violin Concerto was for Isaac Stern, the second for Annesophie Mutter. ‘In a stringed instrument you can always find something different. A new sound or something. It’s like the human voice, and every good player is different. There is really no limit.
‘With music that is already there – written down in one way – a different player can bring a new voice to it. To
‘Monteverdi to me was the genius. I can hardly describe what I felt about his music’
me Anne-sophie has perfection in her playing – the sound, the form, the technique. For me, she is the ideal performer.’
When Penderecki visits the UK this year to mark his 85th, he’ll be conducting the Oxford Philharmonic in the Sheldonian Theatre on 18 May – with a composition masterclass for students the next day. One of the pieces in the programme will be his Viola Concerto in which the soloist has a special connection with the piece. Yuri Zhislin, co-leader of the Oxford Philharmonic, bears the same name as his father, the Russian virtuoso, who gave the first performance of the piece at Penderecki’s request.
Another of the strong threads throughout his output has been his commitment to sacred music. ‘I was brought up in a religious home. Certainly, religion was very important to my mother, perhaps less to my father. But that was the atmosphere, and the inf luence. I was reading Latin and that was how I was learning. If I had lived in the West, of course, my music would have been very different.’
Even when he lived in the US, having a chair at Yale University which he loved, Penderecki says he was not significantly influenced by American culture. ‘No, I was still a European. Of course I was. I was not really fascinated by the American way of life or the culture. I had a good job
– I was well paid – and I enjoyed it very much, because I could do what I wanted. But culturally, I certainly did not change. I never went as far as that.’
Reflecting on the developments that did take place in his style of composition, he is content that the change came naturally. ‘Looking back, and listening to my music once more, I wouldn’t write differently now. Not at all. The early years were an important period, and I think they were important pieces. I had to write them.’
But the experience was also like being in purgatory. ‘I wanted to be different and I was full of energy. I was rushing. I thought my music was important, of course, but I was also thinking all the time of the possibilities of the orchestra and the new sounds. It wasn’t always easy for players, trying to do what I was asking them to do, but later on they accepted it – I think!’
★e found, however, that that paradox of the avant garde was that in his mind it was no longer moving forward. ★e thought it was stuck. So he went his own way. A favourite word crops up frequently in our conversation – ‘stagnation.’
It’s the word he likes to apply to the contemporary scene. When I ask him if he sometimes feels that it is difficult for a composer not to be influenced by the new work going on around him, his answer is blunt: ‘No. Because I believe in my own music; in other music, not so much. There are the great composers whom I admire very much, but what my colleagues are doing elsewhere I am not very much interested in. For me, my music is the most important thing to me. And I do feel that in recent years there has been nothing new. Not really new. We pushed music forwards some time ago and now, I think it’s stagnation. In my youth we were doing something that hadn’t existed before. Now everything seems at the same level. I would say – too much imitation. But I’m sorry, I don’t know very much. I’m so involved in my own music, and in my arboretum.’
From his eastern European perspective, he offers an explanation. ‘Perhaps in the difficult times it was easier for composers. Because all artists were important in the bad times. Art was central to everything. It was how we could express ourselves, and it was important and necessary. The theatre, particularly, was part of the argument, the revolution. Now – not so much. In Poland most people are better off. It is like the West. And the more comfortable they are, the less they care about artistic invention.’ Yet he describes himself as an optimist. ‘We will have to wait a few years, perhaps, but something will happen.’
By the end of the festival, he’s been treated to a rich selection of his work, and it clearly gives him profound satisfaction. Audiences, he says, were resistant to him 30 years ago but have now come to love his music. ★e is surrounded by friends and admirers at the parties. ‘I am trying to write better – to notate better and more clearly – but in the last few years I don’t think my music has changed much. Everything I wanted to do – to write – I did.’
Penderecki conducts the Oxford Philharmonic in works including the
Viola Concerto and Sinfonietta for String Orchestra at Oxford’s Sheldonian, 18 May