Bibliography

Born on January 25, 1913 in Warsaw, Witold Lutoslawski did not emerge as a significant figure among Polish composers until the mid-1950s. At that time his first period of composition had just ended, marked by his Concerto for Orchestra (1950-54), a work which can be described as the highest expression of Polish Neo-classicism, simultaneously using folklore inspiration. A variety of tendencies in his previous compositions had brought him to  that point. One of them was the constructivist path of a modernist composer who sought to create his world of sound in the spirit of the epoch, using the elements of twelve-tone theory in an attempt to create new rules of musical forms. Here should be mentioned above al. the Symphonic Variations (1936-38), the First Symphony (1941-47) and the Overture for Strings (1949). Yet on the other hand another tendency was towards music which to a large extent consisted of commercial works, pedagogical and popular, piano works, songs, and elaborations of folk melodies, the most popular of these were the Little Suite (1950) and Silesian Triptych (1951). Four years after the Concerto for Orchestra, Lutoslawski completed the Funeral Music for strings, the point from which the development of his individual style is dated, the beginning of that 'real' Lutoslawski, which even during his lifetime was described as the 'the classic of music of the 20th century". Thus the year 1958 became the starting point for his biography as an artist; he was already 45 years old.

Whose names should be mentioned in order to indicate the main musical figures of his generation? Dmitri Shostakovich was born in 1906; Olivier Messiaen and Elliott Carter in 1908; John Cage in 1912; Benjamin Britten and Tikhon Khrennikov, like Lutoslawski, in 1913; Henri Dutilleux in 1916; Isang Yun in 1917; and Bernd Alois Zimmermann in 1918. Gustav Mahler died in 1911, Aleksander Scriabin in 1915, and Claude Debussy in 1918. It was also in 1918 that a group of artists began gathering around Eric Satie and Jean Cocteau, ultimately forming the Les Six group in 1920 that came to symbolise the French variant of Neoclassicism. Lutoslawski's Polish contemporaries in the field of composition included Zygmunt Mycielski, Roman Palester and Antoni Szalowski, born in 1907; Grazyna Bacewicz in 1909; Stefan Kisielewski in 1911; and Andrzej Panufnik and Michal Spisak in 1914. One could also mention a variety of contemporaneous events, such the death of Arnold Schönberg in 1951, the year of Lutoslawski's Silesian Triptych; the death of Charles Ives in 1954, the year of the Concerto for Orchestra; the premiere of Karlheinz Stockhausen's Gruppen in 1958, the year of Funeral Music. In 1971, the year of Igor Stravinsky's death, Lutoslawski was working on Preludes and Fugue (1970-72). There is yet another possible comparison to consider; the 45-year-old Krzysztof Penderecki (born 1933) had already written his second opera, Paradise Lost, and his contemporary Henryk Mikolaj Górecki had completed his famous Third Symphony (Symphony of Sorrowful Songs). What, then, is most conspicuous about this rather long list of dates and events?

Most obvious is the belated appearance of those compositions which in an essential way secured Lutoslawski's place in the history of Euro-American music. The Lutoslawski family found itself in extremely difficult financial conditions after the Bolsheviks had shot both the father and uncle of the future composer in 1918 in Moscow, and later their country estate was devastated during the first world war, but these experiences are not particularly helpful in explaining this delayed output. His training in playing the piano and violin, in addition to studies in composition as well as mathematics, ensured that the young Lutoslawski's interests were channelled in various directions, enriching his imagination and undoubtedly stimulating his later musical work. History too played a part in his development as a composer. He finished his studies in composition in 1937 with his diploma piece Lacrimosa for soprano and orchestra, while working simultaneously on the Variations. Of the composer's pre-war compositions, these two works were the only ones performed after the war, and remain the only works from Lutoslawski's earliest period in the concert repertoire today.

Thus the first of history's obstacles was the war. An illustration of this interference is the fact although Lutoslawski began writing his First Symphony in 1941, he did not complete it until 1947. The only completed works from the war era are the Two Etudes for Piano (1940-41) and the famous Variations on a Theme of Paganini (1941) for two pianos, the result of a duet with Andrzej Panufnik played in a cafe in occupied Warsaw (which was not transcribed for piano and orchestra until 1978). History's second obstacle was the post-war period of Polish history, with the country devastated by war and its cultural life driven by the doctrine of real socialism. It was on account of this ideology that the name Tikhon Khrennikov appeared among those of the great composers in the preceding chronology. Barely four months younger than Lutoslawski, Khrennikov was named president of the Union of Composers of the Soviet Republics in 1948 by Stalin and Andrei Zhdanov. He became the chief executor of socialist realism in music, and not just in the Soviet Union. This doctrine dominated an era in Poland that lasted from 1949 until 1955. The destalinisation of political life that began in political and cultural life in 1956 as a result of the 'thaw' made it possible to organise the Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music, which became one of the symbols of the aesthetic changes in music at the time. Lutoslawski's Concerto for Orchestra coincided with the end of the socialist realist period, while the start of the new era marked his first steps towards the creation of a new tonal language. This was a breakthrough, the beginning of the 'real' Lutoslawski that would come to be symbolised by Funeral Music; the Concerto, the Dance Preludes for clarinet and piano (1954), and in particular the Five Songs to Words by Kazimiera Illakowiczówna (for soprano and piano, 1957; for soprano and instrumental group, 1958) marked the turn in this new direction.

The year 1956 was one of shock and upheaval in Poland, a shock that much more telling when recalled in the context of the tragedy in Budapest the same year. Almost certainly things would not have occurred the way they did without Khrushchev's criticism of Stalin's cult of personality at the 20th Soviet Party Congress. The political turmoil unfolded simultaneously with an outburst in the field of culture. While artists staged demonstrations, two international festivals, the Warsaw Autumn and the Jazz Jamboree, were organised in a country in which only two years earlier jazz was played in conspiratorial 'catacombs'. This period also witnessed the beginning of the 'Polish school', which in addition to music composition included jazz, poster art, and film. Who exactly, at that particular moment, was the 44-year-old Witold Lutoslawski and what was he doing?

Two different trends can be discerned in Lutoslawski's aesthetic journey. The first was clearly legible, as mentioned above, leading from the Concert for Orchestra to Funeral Music. The second is a meandering, subtle, and hesitating trend. This second tendency was significant in such works as Epitaph for oboe and piano (1979), the Double Concerto for oboe, harp and chamber orchestra (1979-80), Grave for cello and piano (1981, transcribed in 1982 for cello and strings) and the Third Symphony, which lies at the heart of this essay.

Lutoslawski was in his mid-forties during the period of Funeral Music, with few essentially artistic compositions to his credit. Along with the pre-war Symphonic Variations were the works written in early post-war Poland before socialist realism held sway; the First Symphony and the Overture for strings were considered 'formalistic' and thus aesthetically incorrect in light of the doctrine. The Overture was preceded and followed in Lutoslawski's output by large symphonic works (the First Symphony and the Concerto for Orchestra), and thus it lay somewhat hidden, deflected from the field of vision of music theorists, although it was present in concert repertoires. A short work, little more than five minutes in length, it requires few musicians (based on the tradition of the players in a Neoclassical string orchestra, constructed in a series of pre-war and post-war commissions by Paul Sacher), it contains the conceptual 'potential' without which not only Funeral Music, but likewise the 'chain technique' in Lutoslawski's works of the 1980s, cannot be completely understood. This orchestral aphorism brings together a rich 'table of contents' of the early Lutoslawski and, more importantly, the later Lutoslawski as well, a combination of Neoclassical ideas with the terseness of Webern, with serial manoeuvres in service to the idea of allegro sonata, with a 'chain' exchange of motifs among the various voices in the work, which was conceived as kind of palindrome (Funeral Music is also a kind of palindrome). In terms of development of compositional technique, this little work is of greater significance than the First Symphony and the Concerto for Orchestra (one of the most popular and most frequently played of Lutoslawski's works).

Yet these are not the only works of the 'early' Lutoslawski. The Variations on a Theme by Paganini, Two Etudes, and Songs from the Underground Struggle date from the period of the war. Post-war works include folk melodies and songs, elaborations of Christmas carols, film music, children's songs, piano works of a pedagogical nature (often of great artistic value, e.g. Bucolics, 1952), and finally commercial works (including popular songs), published sometimes under the pseudonym 'Derwid'. This pursuit of the composer's profession in order to support himself, rather than to make a contribution to the artistic shape of Polish and European music, would not end even with the premiere performance of Concerto for Orchestra, which earned Lutoslawski the leading position among composers in Poland, nor with the premiere of Funeral Music, as a result of which he made a frontal leap into the realm of new music in Europe. He continued to write children's songs as late as 1959. The period in which he began limiting himself to the composition of essentially artistic works began with the Three Postludes (appearing between 1958 and 1963) and Jeux vénitiens (1960-61). Marginalia appeared once again among the compositions written in the last years of his life, but in a completely different context, as miniatures written in gratitude, as gifts, as gestures of friendship.

When the 36-year-old Lutoslawski wrote the Overture in 1949, Pierre Boulez, who was 24 at the time, had already written the serial Piano Sonata No. 2, while Olivier Messiaen was in Darmstadt at the time, writing his famous Etude – Mode de valeurs et d'intensités, in which he achieved the serialisation of al. musical parameters. The International Vacation Course for New Music in Darmstadt, by then in existence for three years, had transformed itself from an educational institution (founded for study of the music that had been condemned by  Nazism or lost by emigration to America) into the premiere address of post-war music's avant – garde. It was not possible until 1956 for Polish musicians to enter into dialogue with the newest post- war trends, emanating from Darmstadt, but also from Paris, Cologne and Milan (particularly Pierre Schaeffer's concrete music, Herbert Eimert's and Stockhausen's electronic music, as well as the experimental designs of Luciano Berio and Luigi Nono), as well as from New York (John Cage and his circle of artists).

The Concerto for Orchestra, although an extraordinarily attractive repertoire work and thus a staple of symphonic concert life, is historically significant as well, since symbolically it closes the Neoclassical chapter of Polish music. Furthermore, works as great as the Little Suite could have legitimised the doctrine of socialist realism if they hadn't been conceptually opposed to it. After all, it wasn't opposed to the logical development of the aesthetics of Polish music, as viewed from the national-classical period of the music of Karol Szymanowski in the 1920s and '30s (Slopiewnie, Harnasie, Mazurkas, Symphonie concertante), and – going even further back beyond that era – emanating from the tradition of Chopin. It was typical that in choosing texts for the Five Songs to Words by Illakowiczówna, Lutoslawski selected those which Szymanowski had not used in his song cycle Children's Rhymes. It was his own gesture of distinguishing himself and at the same time of surpassing what already existed in his native musical tradition.

Polish musical aesthetics, with its close links to Parisian Neoclassicism, had an overwhelming influence on contemporary music. Nadia Boulanger was the symbolic figure of this syndrome, and several generations of Polish composers, up to the mid-1970s, passed through her composition class. The Association of Young Polish Musicians, founded in Paris in 1927, served as both a symbolic and practical centre; Aleksander Tansman (1897-1986) in his time served as mentor; among its members who continued to work there after the war were such musicians as Michal Spisak and Antoni Szalowski, in whose circle Zymunt Mycielski and Stefan Kisielewski could also be found. Until the mid-1950s the Neoclassical aesthetic informed the music of such composers as Grazyna Bacewicz, and its elements could be found in the poetically innovative and modernistic (but by no means avant-garde) works conceived by Roman Palester, who left Poland in 1949, and Andrzej Panufnik, whose flight from Poland in 1954 as the nation's most highly honoured composer became a sensation. As a result it was forbidden to perform their works in Poland and their names were censored in print. At the time when Lutoslawski revealed the full power of his talent with the Concerto for Orchestra, it was composers such as Bacewicz and Panufnik who expressed, together with others now considered less important, such as Boleslaw Szabelski (1896-1979) and Artur Malawski (1904-1957), the reality of Polish music. Their output was greater in quantity and more attractive in performance.

When Lutoslawski made his breakthrough with Funeral Music, Polish music had already entered a different era. In that year the second Warsaw Autumn Festival was held, Józef Patkowski founded the electro-acoustical Experimental Studio at Polish Radio, and Wlodzimierz Kotonski had already returned as the first Polish composer to visit Darmstadt; Kazimierz Serocki had the first performance of one of his works there, and Boguslaw Schaeffer (b. 1929) had not only begun his radical experiments, but likewise the publication of books about the newest contemporary music. Young composers who were a decade Lutoslawski's junior, such as Serocki (1922-1981) and Taduesz Baird (1928-1981), were already enormously popular among young composers, while the 'young wolves' born in the early 1930s, recently roused from their slumber when socialist realism was abandoned, sprang into action: Krzysztof Penderecki, Henryk Mikolaj Gorecki and Wojciech Kilar. Twenty years older than these composers, Lutoslawski began to play a prominent role in shaping Poland's reputation for compositional genius, a  creativity esteemed throughout Europe without condescension as a new and fascinating phenomenon.

Lutoslawski made a symbolic gesture of gratitude for the inspiration he had received by presenting John Cage with the manuscript of his Jeux vénitiens (the manuscript is currently in the library of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois). They are based upon the use of a completely different kind of play with chance than that in Cage's Piano Concerto (1958), which Lutoslawski heard by chance during a radio broadcast. Like Polish sonorism, in his play with pure tonality, the creation of works in the form of unique 'catalogues of effects' with the use of untraditional methods of performance, such as the gradual construction of a compositional idiom, Lutoslawski began a dialogue which was at once friendly and 'schismatic' with the shape of European and American music in the early 1960s. It was a friendly dialogue when the scores said: Cage yes, but...; Schönberg yes, but...; Webern yes, but...; Boulez yes, but...; Stockhausen yes, but...; innovation yes, but not necessarily avant- garde. Novelty yes, but it's not necessary to burn down the Louvre; progress yes, but not over the corpse of tradition. Speculation yes, but not with disrespect to the listener's ability to perceive. Intellectualism yes, but without disrespect for the sensuality and psychology of the recipient. Although delighted with the Polish New Wave of the early 1960s, the West mistakenly threw into one basket both Lutoslawski and Penderecki; the former never approached the bruitism in the early works of the latter, considering that the sonorism of Penderecki's works from the beginning of the 1960s such as Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, Polimorphy or Fluorescences was not part of his world. Yet both Lutoslawski and Penderecki, each in his own way, the former in the field of rational play with musical material, the latter with his unique freedom and tonal fauvism, took part in dismantling the aesthetic which had been described as avant-garde, as symbolising 'the old age of new music', cultivated for example at Darmstadt. Although there were also 'environmental forces' that took care of new ideas so that they didn't ossify (for example Boulez, as an apostle of serialism!), the shrine of musical innovation was nevertheless attacked in the late 1950s and early 1960s from four different sides: by György Ligeti (b. 1923), a refugee from Hungary with 'tone clouds'; by Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001), a Greek refugee with 'stochastic' music; by John Cage, an anarchist from New York, whose idea was that 'everything is music'; and of course by the 'Polish school', which maintained that although the composer is permitted to create impossible constructions, it would be impossible, after all, and unethical if the composer had no responsibility to seize the imagination of the listener at the level of pure tonal reception of the composition, and not just at the level of analysing its score.

With Funeral Music Lutoslawski had already begun his period of playing with the perception of the listener on the level of the traditional forms known from Neoclassicism, not from motifs referring to the stereotypes of folklore, but on the level of his newly constructed objects and the strategies that operate them. Beginning with Funeral Music, Lutoslawski created this compositional idiom in order to serve the ideal listener according to his or her psycho-physical construction (even though he alone was this ideal listener). This listener can not bear an excess of impressions – so there must first be an enticing phase, inviting and not demanding intense intellectual effort, for example the Introduction in the QuartetHesitant in the Second Symphony. But also like the group of the three first Livres, before the fourth Livre, connected with the clever links (Livre pour orchestra, 1968). Lutoslawski introduced the same, but not exactly the same, in Mi-parti (1975-76) and in Novelette (1978-79), and – by now at a higher level of complicated form – in the Preludes and Fugue. But he had also done this in the three first parts of the Jeux vénitiens, before the fourth appears, although at the time Lutoslawski did not yet consciously have the idea of bipartite form in his system. And thus the listener (although that one ideal listener) has no right to escape Lutoslawski's control and will be lead to that single point culminating point after which the construction of the whole expires. The philosophy of perception upon which Lutoslawski's musical narration is grounded contains a rich library of tools and tricks. The composer knows when his listener might become bored and thus knows when to introduce a  different kind of music, related in no way whatsoever to that which preceded it. The composer knows that if for some time only wind instruments have played, then strings must be used afterwards. If for a  certain time only a few intervals or tones have been used, then the next part should use those that haven't been played yet, and to which the listener's perception is particularly open, albeit unconsciously. This explains the composer's construction of numerous episodes, refrains, and segments, which mesh and exchange with each other. Music must not be boring, it must (on a different level of attention) continue to engage, intrigue, and create interest. The psychology of perception is the first commandment with regard to the listener.

But there's also the first commandment to the performers of his works. The performer, although a musician in a 100-member symphony orchestra, must be treated as an individual, and not like a screw in a factory for playing music. Thus the concept of soloist music, music which is created out of individual phrases performed by musicians treated individually. 'Be a soloist, you're a free person', he suggests in the serial fragments of his scores. Although Lutoslawski created these having in mind the freedom of the musician in the orchestra to perform them at will, the musician would never escape the composer's control. This precisely planned space of the freedom for self-expression given to them becomes an unusual quality of a Lutoslawski score in the eyes of those who perform it. They create a region of friendship between the composer and performers, difficult to achieve in contemporary music. This is a  game with the elements of chance played ad libitum, his controlled aleatorism which has nothing in common with improvisation, giving the music its unique colour and creating its ethereal texture, its surrealistic, abstract shape, creating the impression of a flickering micro-rhythm. This is friendship both with regard to the listener and friendship with regard to the performer, the strategy of a master who knows perfectly well what he wants to achieve and how to do it.

The modernist dimension of Lutoslawski's aesthetics, exemplified exquisitely by the String Quartet, embodied in the Third Symphony a trend that was present in the works of many composers in the late 1970s and early 1980s, reflecting the syndrome of a changed stylistic paradigm. Lutoslawski's last completed symphonic work, the Fourth Symphony, is a document of his breakthrough in which the gesture of a modernist is combined with that of a post-modernist in conceptual harmony.

Reaching back into the history of music to Viennese classicism, who is most important for understanding Lutoslawski? Certainly not Beethoven, although the opening of Lutoslawski's Third Symphony could lead us to think so. It was Haydn, who created a classic idiom not yet as masterly as Mozart's and not yet haunted with the Romantic spirit as Beethoven's, Haydn's Enlightenment optimism researching strategy and checking the new rules of the game. Lutoslawski's statements very often reflect the influence of the French tradition, lead by Debussy and Albert Roussel. These are two rather different traditions, which nevertheless can serve as a common denominator from a certain distance. He often renounced the school of Schönberg. Thus we're dealing here with a unique riddle. Without the tradition of twelve-tone ideas as embodied in the Symphonic Variations and the Overture for Strings, the entire span of Lutoslawski's works from Funeral Music to the compositions of the 1980s cannot possibly be interpreted, with many basic departures and creative transformations from Schönberg's ideas. He has thus, as it were, adapted dome laws from this school to  his own ends, but with a strong rejection of the school's spirit. And in spite of its refined taste in colour and its unique 'multicultural' symbolism, Lutoslawski's music cannot be viewed as simply the consequence of Debussy's idiom.

Yet symbolism is an essential concept, related to Lutoslawski's music through his choice of French poetry, which he used four times in his orchestral song cycles: Three Poems by Henri Michaux (1961-63), Paroles tissées (1965), Les espaces du someil (1975), and Chantefleurs et Chantefables (1989-90). It is also apparent in his comments about the Quartet and the problems of the play of chance in this work inspired by the mobiles of Alexander Calder. The signs of inspiration reveal very clearly the places where Lutoslawski placed his imagination and he displayed them prominently in his music. It might be illuminating here to consider his reply when he was asked when he had never written an opera. He answered that if he had found the kind of literary work that had inspired the libretto for Ravel's L'Enfant et les sortileges, in other words one in which no one is surprised when a teakettle sings and in that way expresses its feelings, he would have written an opera.

The French Surrealists Henri Michaux, Jean-François Chabrun and twice Robert Desnos were obviously an inspiration. The flickering uncertainty of the semantic meanings, more the sound than content, more the logic of dreams than the words of the poetry chosen in the composer's studio, sum up their equivocal, constant movement like a Calder construction. These objects, suspended on wires, constantly change colour and light, floating the tonal sound structures float within the pages of the scores of the Quartet, the Jeux vénitiens or the Poems. If we thus need to view Lutoslawski in the general cultural landscape as a post-surrealist, than it must be with the reservation that he is not in the tradition of Salvador Dali or Rene Margritte, since with Lutoslawski we are clearly dealing with a taste for abstract surrealism, not the anecdotal variety.

In addition to parallels with poetry and the plastic arts, something else is also very important. It is Lutoslawski idea of theatre, for which perhaps the most appropriate analogy is Ionesco's concept of theatre. Many disagreements arose about the meaning of Lutoslawski's famous commentary about his Cello Concerto (1969-70). In a letter to Mstislav Rostropovich, to whom the work was dedicated and who was the first to perform it, he sketched a dramaturgic conflict between the individual, who seeks to express his message, and the ceaseless interventions of the collective. Yet sketching a  para-theatrical dramaturgy was far from his intention when he sought to  find an anecdote in order to development a musical form and deprive the tonal structure of its pure musical autonomy. Avoidance of literal meaning, ambiguity, and conjectured content that leave the listener's imagination freedom of choice – this is Lutoslawski's world of impression and expression.

He did not abandon this world in the last phase of his composition when he began playing with post-modernism. No, it was not forced on him by the pressure of the era and the new paradigm. The decision to reactivate melody and harmony, which could be associated with the tonal system of the past (in which Lutoslawski until the very end emphasised his lack of interest), as well as to reactivate Neoclassical strategies, seems to have been lead by his own compositional system, which ruled him as much as he ruled it. In this field of play the composer with his style and his style with the composer is an odd return to the idiom of the 'childishness' of Chantefleurs et Chantefables, a striving for bravura gestures of virtuoso, remembering Liszt and Rachmaninoff, in the Piano Concerto (1987-88). The series of three works with a common title Chains (I for chamber ensemble, 1983; II – Dialogue for violin and orchestra, 1984-85; III for orchestra, 1986) are emblematic of this period. Here the strategy of beginning something new, before finishing what was begun previously, of placing in one a layer of qualities missing in another, is upheld to some extent as a model and an ideal, although present in entire series of his other works. This idea is realised in a variety of macro- and very micro-methods, and it could also be compared to the weaving of braids. Among these works is one of great importance, the Partita for Violin and Piano composed in 1984 (transcribed for orchestral version in 1988), in which the central Largo changes into Lutoslawski's style from before the Third Symphony, a completely alien, romantic tone. In his final phase of composition Lutoslawski began to weave even those strands into an entirety, which he acknowledged as dear to himself, although they had existed prior to the era of Funeral Music.

The edifice of Lutoslawski's oeuvre as a whole, built little by little, step by step, was constructed as an integrated work, heavily interwoven with artistic ideals; an integrated work, rare in the history of music – harmonised, bearing fascinating and explicit witness with its individuality to the history of music in the second half of the 20th century, issuing a clear message to the century that follows.