Krzysztof Penderecki
Avant-garde Polish composer and conductor who trod a fine line between patriotism and dissidence
KRZYSZTOF PENDERECKI, who has died aged 86, was an avant-garde Polish composer who stood boldly at the forefront of the musical response to the popular uprising in his homeland in the early 1980s, successfully navigating the narrow political pathway between the patriotic and the provocative.
He explored different ways of playing traditional instruments, using “extended techniques” to push the boundaries of music. Violinists were instructed to draw the wood rather than their bow hairs over the strings; cellists were told to play behind the bridge, creating a squeaky high tone; orchestral “cluster chords” threw out sounds like primeval screams; quartertones created an expressionistic sound world; and some of his works included parts for typewriter, paper and glass. “The musicians thought I was mad,” he told Nicholas Kenyon in 1983, adding that some had even gone on strike in protest at his demands.
Yet many of Penderecki’s works were in fact deeply spiritual, often recalling the horrors of the 20th century. Though his work often verged on the political, he was never totally suppressed by the authorities. A Te Deum written in 1979 and dedicated to the Polish Pope John Paul II, was based on an old Polish hymn, underlining his loyalty to his country as much as to the church. “Since I became so successful, they tolerate me,” he told Kenyon drily.
Penderecki was not the only 20th-century Polish composer. Witold Lutoslawski, 20 years his senior, began by exploring folk song and moved into 12-tone music, benefiting from the cultural thaw that followed Stalin’s death in 1953. Henryk Górecki, two weeks Penderecki’s junior, was more of a political agitator who turned to spiritual minimalism in his Symphony of Sorrowful Songs.
Penderecki, who unlike Lutoslawski and Górecki maintained links with the Polish establishment during martial law in 1981, was too young to benefit fully from the Khruschev-era détente and too idealistic to care for public taste. Having taken much of his early inspiration from the music of Bartók, he went on to develop ideas that had been opened up by Xenakis, Stockhausen and Boulez, and when an electronic music studio opened in Warsaw in 1957 he embraced its potential. “This electronic music changed my aesthetic completely,” he once said.
Yet within a decade Penderecki had broken from the mainstream European avant-garde to pursue his own path. From shattering screams and percussive abuse of instruments he moved to conventional melody, albeit supported by complex tonal structures. There were violin concertos for Isaac Stern (1977) and Anne Sophie-mutter (1995) and a cello concerto, his second, for Mstislav Rostropovich (1992). He also cut across genres, collaborating for example with Jonny Greenwood, the Radiohead guitarist (they gave a concert together at the Barbican in 2012).
Unsurprisingly, given a childhood scarred by the German invasion of his country, the apocalyptic horrors of the 20th century were never far away. Threnos (1960), a morass of crashing chords, searing glissandos and other experimental techniques that is scored for 52 string instruments, was
originally called 8’ 37” and looked destined to fall foul of the Polish authorities until someone suggested it be dedicated to the victims of Hiroshima. In a similar apocalyptic theme he also wrote Dies Irae
(Auschwitz Oratorio) in 1967.
But the memorialising of man’s inhumanity to man did not stop with the Second World War. The Polish
Requiem, which he began in 1980, includes a Lacrimosa dedicated to Lech Walesa, the leader of the Solidarity uprising, as well as movements dedicated to the Polish victims of Auschwitz and the 1944 Warsaw uprising. The hour-long Seven
Gates of Jerusalem (1997), the seventh of his eight symphonies, written to celebrate the 3,000th anniversary of the holy city, calls for three choirs, five soloists and an augmented orchestra.
Turning his attention to the new world, there was the ironically named
Paradise Lost (1978), based on Milton’s poem and set to a libretto by Christopher Fry and Sam Wanamaker for Chicago Lyric Opera to mark the bicentenary of American independence, while Resurrection is a piano concerto written in response to the 9/11 attacks.
Critics accused him of having “mathematical emotions”, of being too calculated in his many memorial works, both in terms of their content and their commercial potential. He countered by saying that the rational and the emotional were equally important: “You cannot just improvise and count on the inspiration of the moment.”
Krzysztof Eugeniusz Penderecki was born in Debica, 80 miles east of Krakow, on November 23 1933, the second of three children of Tadeusz, a lawyer who would be banned from practising by the Nazis, and his wife Zofia. He grew up in a musical milieu, with his father and uncles playing chamber music at home, yet he had no exposure to the music of Stravinsky or Schoenberg until his twenties. When the Germans invaded in 1939 the family’s home was taken over by the Ministry of Food and the Pendereckis were moved to a house that belonged to a Jewish family who had been forcibly evicted.
Young Krzysztof studied violin and piano yet harboured ambitions to be an engineer, naval officer or gamekeeper. However, his music making – especially his violin playing – flourished sufficiently in high school that, in 1951, he was sent to Krakow University, where he also studied philosophy, Greek and Latin.
Moving on to the Krakow Academy of Music he worked with Artur Malewski and Stanislas Wiechowicz, making a particular study of counterpoint, especially in Bach and Stravinsky. He also taught ancient church music in a theological college and wrote about new music for the
Ruch Muzyczny newspaper.
In his early years Penderecki worked at the Café Michalika, an art nouveau restaurant in the old quarter of Krakow, starting with breakfast and often still being at the same table by lunchtime. On one occasion he submitted three works to a competition run by the League of Polish Composers that required anonymous entries: he won the three top prizes, including a trip to Italy where he met the composer Luigi Nono.
Penderecki was appointed professor at Krakow Academy in 1958, becoming rector in 1972, the same year in which he began conducting his own orchestral works for a series of EMI discs, despite never having any formal training.
One of his earliest compositions was
Epitafium (1958), an instrumental Requiem in memory of Malewski who had died during his studies. Psalms of
David (1958), a 10-minute work for chorus, strings and percussion that bore the influence of Stravinsky was next. His interest in exploring different ways of playing instruments was first seen in Strophes (1959), in which he called for three-stringed instruments and demanded that the players use pizzicato, glissando, harmonics and extended bowing techniques. This work, in particular, brought him international attention.
He explained his move away from the more extreme elements of modernity with reference to great painters: “Take Picasso, who was always going forward and back, forward and back. This is the kind of artist I admire very much. Not like Chagall, who was painting almost the same way for 50 years.” Indeed, after the brutal style of the first symphony, which was given its world premiere by the LSO at Peterborough Cathedral in 1973, his second (The Christmas Symphony, 1980) has been described as “almost Brucknerian”.
This turn towards tradition was evident in the St Luke Passion (1965), with its use of the medieval organum and old church chorales. The work found a receptive audience both at home and overseas, while also opening the way for concerts in Polish churches for the first time in a generation. Utrenja (1971) continued the religious theme, deploying Orthodox chant in its depiction of Christ being laid in the tomb and the Resurrection.
His first opera, The Devils of Loudun, based on the work of Aldous Huxley, appeared in 1969 and was performed by Sadler’s Wells Opera at the Coliseum in 1973; a revised version was heard in Copenhagen 40 years later.
By now Penderecki, a Left-wing Catholic, was being celebrated around the world. There were composition residencies, and honours from bodies as diverse as Unesco and the Polish state. He conducted the St Luke Passion at the Proms in 1983, just as martial law was being lifted in Poland, while the Royal Academy of Music held a festival in his honour in 1986.
In 2011 he reverted to experimental form when, as a juror for the Tchaikovsky cello competition in Moscow, he wrote Violoncello totale for the competitors, the “totale” referring to his requirement that the performer use the entire body of the instrument, including tapping on it and playing below the bridge. “These elements enrich the cello and give it another dimension,” he insisted. “It is as if the instrument transforms from a strictly stringed instrument to a universal one.”
His home, near Krakow, was a veritable museum of objets d’art: a 17th-century Flemish cupboard dominated the main room; more than 30 clocks – from all manner of countries and centuries – kept time; and an array of religious icons kept a prayerful watch as he composed at a five-metre oak dining table. In the grounds he created a stunning garden and arboretum.
He is survived by his second wife Elzbieta Solecka, whom he married in 1965. They had first met when she was 10 and was a piano student of his first wife, Barbara. Elzbieta was a marvellous hostess, whose menus of borscht and sauerkraut were widely admired. They had a son and a daughter. He also had a daughter from his first marriage.