remembering lutoslawski Steven Stucky most prominent work of its genre since Shostakovich. And of course music lovers have embraced his later, more accessible Third and Fourth symphonies (1972-83; 1988-92) unreservedly.
What explains this kind of success for a late-twentieth-century atonal composer? For a composer whose work avoids allusions to pop music, lacks the sort of tunes you go out whistling (usually), and, in a multicultural age, remains stubbornly true to its Western European ‘Classical’ heritage? Music that resists all concessions to fashion, to ‘relevance’, or to the habits of easy listening? The answers lie in fundamental values: the ravishing beauty of Lutosławski’s French-Slavic sound world, his rich harmonic language, his expressive melodic voice, his lucid forms, his attention to dramatic tension and Photo: ©Private collection of Krystyna Witkowska release, and, underpinning everything, his drive to communicate. In Lutosławski’s Thoughts about nineteenth-century magically colourful sound worlds, his Polish music inevitably revolve about frankly gorgeous effects are never merely Fryderyk Chopin; so, too, do painted on; they are intrinsic to the discussions of Polish music in the expression. (Much the same can be said, of twentieth century center inescapably course, of his musical forebear, Debussy.) on Witold Lutosławski. It was a trait he developed precociously early — the 1938 Symphonic Variations Several of his popular early works are already reveal an orchestral master — but lodged firmly in the canon: the Paganini he continued to expand and refine his Variations, the Concerto for Orchestra, palette right to the end. Dance Preludes. More impressive, though, is the staying power of several supposedly Yet Lutosławski was also a creature of ‘difficult’, modernist compositions, contradictions and paradoxes, both as such as Musique funèbre (1954-58), a man and as a musician. Some of these the String Quartet (1964), and the Cello are the simple, charming contradictions Concerto (1968-70), the latter surely the of everyday life. A supreme idealist in many ways, he also knew the value of movement of Mała suita (Little Suite), pragmatism: asked about his approach to written in 1950 for a light-music orchestra guest conducting a different orchestra every at the Polish Radio, is transparently a first week, with only a few days’ preparation sketch toward the mighty Concerto for in each city, he replied, ‘First, we avoid a Orchestra composed just afterward. scandal. The striking crowd scene ‘Le grand combat’ If there is a little time left at the end from Trois poèmes d’Henri Michaux (1961- of the week, we make a little music.’ A 63) is an effect he had first tried out in the determined modernist, he took time in score for a Polish Radio play. The opening 1984 to compose a charming arrangement music in Les espaces du sommeil (1975) of the traditional carol ‘The Holly and the hearkens back to the folkloristic Silesian Ivy’ — in F major. A meticulous craftsman Triptych (1951). The solo woodwind lines who planned each of his works with the that festoon the opening section of Mi- utmost care, he nevertheless insisted on parti (1976) originated in incidental music the necessity of irrationality in music, on for the theatre written about twenty years the value of ‘the slip of the pen’. earlier.
Other paradoxes lie deeper, nearer the Indeed in Lutosławski’s case the heart of Lutosławski’s musical language. whole public/private dichotomy is an As Adrian Thomas discusses elsewhere in exceptionally rich vein to be mined further. these pages, this composer made his living The dichotomy extends much further than from 1945 into the early 1960s by writing simply commerce v. art. Despite the high all sorts of ‘functional’ music: for the polish and seeming confidence of virtually theatre, for children, for Polish Radio, even every work he ever released to the public, proletarian mass songs and (under the for most of Lutosławski’s life he nursed a pseudonym ‘Derwid’) popular standards deep, private dissatisfaction with his own for Polish crooners. musical language: ‘I could not compose as I wished, so I He was careful to divert attention from this composed as I was able’, he said in 1958. music, and after he became internationally As late as the 1980s, though he knew very famous for his concert works he might have well his own worth, still he claimed that preferred not to acknowledge it at all. Yet ‘the only reason to write the next piece is in 1985, when he was filmed in Southern California seated at a friend’s piano, what music was he playing? One of his own Folk Melodies arrangements from 1945! He liked to dismiss these smaller efforts (the 1982 Mini Overture for brass quintet, for example), as ‘composing with the left hand’.
Yet he had an awfully good left hand, and the distinction between his music- The Lutoslawski family en route to Moscow, 1915 - for-money and his music-for-art was not Witold in foreground, aged two always clear-cut. For example, the first Photo: ©Private collection of Krystyna Witkowska ‘the Parallel Path.’ (These materials are now in the Library of the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel.)
These sketches were not made in connection with composing actual pieces; they were basic research, carried out at exhaustive length and with rare discipline. Homma notes that Lutosławski felt that his task was like that of an architect ‘who has to start by making his own bricks.’ Still, it comes as something of a shock to learn that Lutosławski left behind almost as many private pages as public ones, as much invisible music as visible.
As Homma has shown, the Parallel Path sketches illuminate another Lutosławskian Witold Lutoslawski at the piano, aged nine. Photo: ©Private collection of Krystyna Witkowska contradiction: his attitude towards Schoenberg and twelve-tone technique. He to correct what is irritating in the last one!’ was at frequent pains to distance himself He was evidently aware from early on that from Schoenberg and Webern (but not he lacked the means to realize the music he Berg), going so far as to call the tradition was dreaming of: think of the experimental they represented ‘alien.’ Yet some 200 canons he composed, huddled together pages in Basel are filled with Lutosławski’s with his mother in their attic hiding place studies of twelve-tone rows, though these during the Warsaw Rising of 1944. Or note rows are quite un-Schoenberg-like in this confession: ‘In 1947, when I finished their emphasis on particular kinds of Symphony No. 1, I clearly realized that the Lutosławskian harmonic content. language I had used in it would not lead me very far . . . . Therefore, I decided to Moreover, in a great many works from start almost from scratch, assuming some the First Symphony onward — Musique axioms that were then obvious to me, funèbre, the Second Symphony, Preludes such as that not even the simplest move and Fugue, Les espaces, Mi-parti, in music, even a vertical or horizontal Novelette, the Double Concerto, Grave, interval, a rhythm or a timbre, or the the Mini Overture, even the sketches for slightest musical element is unimportant the unfinished Violin Concerto at the end from the point of view of expression.’ of his life — Lutosławski’s special-purpose rows play a role. As a result, from the late 1940s or about 1950 right up to his death in 1994, in In ‘Lutosławski and the Scars of Wars’, addition to his public, ‘visible’ catalogue Charles Bodman Rae cannily notes Lutosławski amassed a hidden oeuvre another basic duality. For all Lutosławski’s of hundreds of pages of sketches on the legendary love of control, his ‘need to fundamentals of his sound language — create order in a chaotic world’ (which what scholar Martina Homma has called extended everywhere, from his immaculate dress, to his careful pacing of dishes as same work in the programme notes for the dinner was being served, but of course 7 March concert. most importantly to his tightly controlled composing techniques), nevertheless Lutosławski’s own frequent admonitions central features of his mature middle- against over-specific interpretation — ‘For period music (1956-79) are the techniques the thousandth time: music doesn’t express of so-called aleatory counterpoint and any specific feelings, it only constitutes the limited (or controlled) aleatorism, which, formal framework in which, while listening, within limits, are about ‘emancipating everyone experiences their own emotions, performers, about valuing the role and according to their own personality’ — freedom of the individual within the collides with his own behaviour while collective’. composing and rehearsing that very piece: couching his descriptions of the music to Rae notes, too, the paradox that from Rostropovich in explicitly theatrical terms, such a ‘buttoned-up personality’ emerged acquiescing to the cellist’s enthusiastically ‘some of the most spectacular orchestral personal approach to the music, even egging eruptions in the entire repertory.’ Exactly him on: ‘But Sława, you will triumph in the end!’ so. Here and there, Lutosławski seems to have From the First Symphony onward left trails of clues with distinct emotional (a score completed in the immediate resonance. One such trail is a particular postwar aftermath, and therefore hard kind of dolente (sorrowful) melody not to interpret as having been born involving mostly stepwise, rhythmically under calamitous circumstances), most even motion and the insertion of grace- of Lutosławski’s orchestral scores, and note ‘sobs’ (something like the historical arguably the String Quartet as well, pianto motif of lamentation). culminate in a catastrophic outburst, or else in a forced, failed attempt at an optimistic The original of Lutosławski’s dolente conclusion — to put a happy face on melody is here, in the slow movement of whatever disaster we are not supposed to the Cello Concerto; the trail leads thence to be talking about (Second Symphony, Chain Epitaphium (1979), the slow movement of 3). I can report another bit of evidence the Double Concerto (1979-80), the Third about emotions that did not always stay Symphony (1972-83), Chain 1 (1983), the buttoned up. On many occasions I sat next first and third movements of the Partita to Lutosławski during performances of his (1984), the third movement of Chain 2, and music; when the String Quartet or Partita the third movement of the Piano Concerto was being played, often this most private (1987-88). While we have to resist the of men was quietly weeping. temptation to link this recurring motif with specific biographical or psychological facts Here, too, in the vexed question of what from the composer’s life, we can hardly music ‘means’ and what his music ‘means’ accept that such a highly charged melodic lurk contradictions and paradoxes. style is merely abstract sound. Nicholas Reyland’s treatment of dramatic and narrative aspects in the Cello Concerto And on a larger level, there is Lutosławski’s is a good place to start, especially when intense interest in the psychology of contrasted with my own description of the the listener: ‘I understand the process of composing above all as the creation the composer remains so beloved after he of a definite complex of psychological has gone. experiences for my listener . . . . I try never to lose sight of my basic aim, which is to When he died in Warsaw in February 1994, compose the particular aesthetic experiences he had been a composer for 75 years, from of my listener.’ ‘I always try to compose the the age of six. He had ‘caught’ lots of souls perception of a work, not only the notes.’ in those 75 years. And, given the timeless, classic quality of his best works and the This approach may seem to sit rigorous standard of artistic integrity he set uncomfortably with his insistence on himself, one suspects that he will be finding avoiding extra-musical readings of still more soul-mates in this his centennial music. Yet it has deep roots in his own year, and for many years to come. understanding of the Classical repertoire as revealed to him by his composition teacher Witold Maliszewski in the 1930s, in particular Beethoven’s treatment of large- scale forms and Haydn’s art of ‘leading the listener through a composition’.
And so we return to communication. But what is being communicated? Nothing, but everything: nothing specific, apparently, but nevertheless something terribly urgent. In 1973 Lutosławski wrote in his private ‘Notebook of Ideas’, ‘I have a strong desire to communicate something to people, through my music. I am not working to win myself many “fans”; I do not want to convince, I want to find. I would like to find people who in the depths of their souls feel the same way as I do. They are the people who are closest to me, even if I do not know them personally.
I regard creative activity as a kind of Photos clockwise from above - Lutoslawski’s photo soul-fishing, and the “catch” is the best from his Gimnazjum graduation certificate in 1931 medicine for loneliness, that most human - Witold (centre) with brothers Henryk and Jerzy of sufferings.’ Photos: ©Private collection of Krystyna Witkowska In life a person of refined manners, lively but dignified bearing, and great reserve about expressing his feelings (even in private), in his music Lutosławski could be frankly, deeply emotional. That combination, surface polish and powerful depths, is surely one reason that Lutosławski the man was so beloved in life and that Lutosławski woven-words.co.uk