Lutosłavski, Vitold
Lutosłavski, Vitold
Lutosłavski, Vitold
1. Life, 1913–45.
2. Life, 1945–94.
3. Works up to 1956.
4. The period of transition, 1956–60.
5. Stylistic maturity, 1960–79.
6. The late works, 1979–94.
WORKS
WRITINGS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Lutosławski, Witold
1. Life, 1913–45.
He was born into a distinguished family of the Polish landed gentry which had
its estates in and around Drozdowo, on the river Narew, north-east of Warsaw.
He was the youngest son of Józef Lutosławski (1881–1918), an accomplished
amateur pianist who had taken lessons with Eugene d'Albert. Together with
four of his brothers, Józef was active in the politics of the National Democracy
Party, Endecja, which sought to align Poland with Imperial Russia in order to
counter the expansionism of Imperial Germany. On the outbreak of World War
I, many Poles associated with Endecja sought refuge in Russia. The
Lutosławski family, who found themselves directly in the path of the invading
army, left for Moscow, where Witold spent his next three years of childhood: he
later recalled witnessing the commotion in the streets at the time of the 1917
February and October revolutions. Both before and during the revolutionary
period, Józef Lutosławski was away from Moscow helping to organize the
formation of Polish military units under the cover of the Imperial administration.
But after the October revolution, the Poles found themselves in direct conflict
with the victorious Bolsheviks. Józef and his brother Marian were arrested and,
in September 1918, executed by firing squad. After her husband's death Maria
Lutosławska left Moscow with her three sons, taking refuge at her family home
in the Ukraine. Once the German occupation of Warsaw had ended on 13
November 1918, the family returned briefly to Drozdowo, the estates of which
had been ravaged during the occupation, before settling again in the centre of
Warsaw.
It was in Warsaw that Witold's musical education began. At the age of six he
started to have lessons with a well regarded piano teacher, Helena Hoffman,
who gave him a secure grounding in piano technique and music theory. His
mother's financial difficulties, however, forced her to curtail the lessons after
two years. In 1921, the family returned to Drozdowo, and Lutosławski resumed
piano lessons with a local teacher. The training was not of the same calibre as
that provided by Hoffman; nevertheless he was encouraged to compose, and,
by the age of nine, had produced his first piano piece.
In 1924 Maria and her sons returned to live in Warsaw, where Lutosławski
entered the prestigious Stefan Batory high school and continued his piano
studies with Józef Śmidowicz (1888–1962). Two years later, in 1926, he began
violin studies with an eminent teacher, Lidia Kmitowa (1888–1967), and, after
six years, had gained sufficient proficiency on the instrument to be able to
perform solo works by Bach, as well as Mozart concertos and the Franck
sonata. Perhaps the most significant musical experience from his adolescence
was a 1924 concert performance in Warsaw of Szymanowski's Symphony no.3
‘Song of the Night’ (1914–16). This was apparently his first exposure to the live
orchestral sound in that rich, post-Debussian harmonic vocabulary
characteristic not only of Szymanowski but also of Ravel and early Stravinsky.
These figures, together with Debussy, were to influence the development of
Lutosławski's sound language. Some aspects of Szymanowski's musical
aesthetic, such as his ‘orientalism’ and his effusive emotionalism, were later to
repel him. Lutosławski's cooler, more controlled temperament was inclined
more to the anti-Romanticism of Stravinsky than the post-Romanticism of his
compatriot.
After passing his final high school examinations in 1931, Lutosławski enrolled
at Warsaw University to study mathematics, while continuing to study privately
with Maliszewski, Kmitowa and Śmidowicz. That year he composed incidental
music for a dramatization of Haroun al Rashid. In 1932, he formally entered
Maliszewski's composition and analysis class at the Warsaw Conservatory; he
also discontinued his violin studies in order to concentrate on the piano,
enrolling at the Conservatory as a student of Jerzy Lefeld (1898–1980). The
following year he curtailed his studies of mathematics, withdrawing from
Warsaw University in order to devote himself fully to a musical career.
The most immediate result of his new concentration on composition was the
first performance of an orchestral piece (lost at the end of the war): a revised
version of a dance from Haroun al Rashid was conducted by Józef Ozimiński
at the Warsaw Philharmonic Hall. The most significant piece from these
student years is also his earliest extant work, the Piano Sonata, completed in
December 1934. Lutosławski gave several performances of the piece himself,
notably in Riga and Wilno (now Vilnius) in 1935. It was at one of the Riga
performances that he had his one and only meeting with Szymanowski.
Lutosławski, Witold
2. Life, 1945–94.
With the absence of musical life in Warsaw in 1945, cultural and artistic activity
transferred to Kraków where there was still an infrastructure. From 29 August
to 2 September the first congress of the new Polish Composers' Union (ZKP)
was held, together with a festival of new music, at which Lutosławski's Wind
Trio was first performed. He was elected secretary and treasurer of the ZKP
and held these honorary positions until the political deterioration of 1948. For a
brief period immediately after the war, Lutosławski held the position of music
director at Polish Radio. He also embarked on a series of projects for Polskie
Wydawnictwo Muzyczne (PWM), the new Polish publishing house for music,
based in Kraków. In 1946 he wrote incidental music for two films, one of which,
Suita Warszawska, is a particularly good example of his deft treatment of folk
sources and imaginative use of small orchestral resources.
The decade from the late 1970s to the late 80s witnessed the birth,
suppression and ultimate victory of the Solidarity movement in Poland.
Lutosławski's position in relation to the events of this period is significant in that
he found himself among an élite group of internationally acclaimed Polish
figures in whom a kind of unofficial moral leadership became invested. His
address to the Congress of Culture in early December 1981 included open
references to the damage caused by the Stalinist cultural dictates of the 1950s
(under which he and many others had suffered). During the period of severe
oppression which followed the imposition of martial law that same month,
Lutosławski was one of the most high-profile figures to observe the artists’
boycott of the state media, and he remained true to it throughout the decade
by refusing to conduct his music in Poland, declining to meet government
ministers and refusing offers of state prizes and other financial inducements.
The integrity of his stance was recognized by the award of the Solidarity Prize
in 1983. Only after the suppression of Solidarity was lifted, leading to the free
elections of 1988–9, did Lutosławski end his boycott, resuming his participation
in Polish public life and joining a number of advisory committees set up by the
newly-elected president, Lech Wałęsa. Wałęsa's presidency saw the
reintroduction of the Order of the White Eagle, an award which had not been
made during the communist period. The first recipient was Pope John Paul II;
the second, in January 1994, a month before his death, was Lutosławski.
Lutosławski, Witold
3. Works up to 1956.
Lutosławski, Witold
The Five Songs (1957, orchd 1958), to poems by Kazimiera Iłłakowicz, mark a
radical change of style and compositional technique, and were his first pieces
to employ 12-note chords. 12-note chords, used as structural elements in their
own right without recourse to serial techniques, were to remain the cornerstone
of his compositional technique for the rest of his career. Lutosławski's most
characteristic 12-note sonorities are those in which the musical space is
subdivided into three musical registers (high, middle, low), each containing
particular kinds of four-note chord configuration (according to the principle of
pitch complementation, whereby three four-note chords provide 12 pitches
without duplication). The songs are studies in this type of harmony.
In his next work, Musique funèbre, Lutosławski reserved the full density of
vertical 12-note harmony for the third section of the piece (Apogeum). In the
piece as a whole it is the influence of Bartók, to whose memory the work is
dedicated, that underlies both the dramatic shape and the distinctive intervallic
vocabulary. The dramatic unfolding of the piece resembles that of the first
movement of Bartók's Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, which also
reaches its climax close to the point of the Golden Section. Whereas the
Bartók is fugal, the Lutosławski is canonic, at least in the first and fourth
sections. Both pitch and rhythm are tightly organized, the pitch organization
being governed in the canonic sections by a 12-note row consisting exclusively
of alternating tritones and semitones. Lutosławski had experimented with this
type of interval-pairing in several earlier pieces, such as the Dance Preludes,
but never before had he used it as the primary material for a whole work.
Moreover the use of the technique in conjunction with a 12-note row makes
Musique funèbre a significant landmark in Lutosławski's career. After
completing the work he embarked on another orchestral project: the Postlude
no.1 (1958–60), which turned out to be another Bartókian piece, both in terms
of its manipulation of intervallic cells and its dramatic shape (which climaxes at
the Golden Section). But while working on the project Lutosławski, now with
highly developed and sophisticated resources for harmonic organization, found
himself dissatisfied with his handling of rhythm and polyphony. The suggestion
of a way out of this impasse came from an unexpected source.
Lutosławski, Witold
In each of Lutosławski's works from the 1960s the aleatory and textural
elements nonetheless form only part of the total picture and are at the service
of a serious treatment of formal considerations. In Jeux vénitiens (1960–61),
for example, the often discussed aleatory ‘game’ which he played in the first
movement can be seen as a variant of the scheme of refrains and episodes
which he later explored in several other works. The progress of the fourth
movement, which unfolds through a succession of overlapping textural blocks,
functions in a broader sense as the climactic phase of the four-movement
design.
Lutosławski's next orchestral work, Livre pour orchestre (1968), rather than
adopting the two-movement scheme, reworks the four-movement structure
used in Jeux vénitiens. The orchestral writing is less dense than in the Second
Symphony, with fewer ‘sound masses’ and more clearly defined harmonic
sonorities in the different registers. This new harmonic clarity was achieved
thanks to a refinement of Lutosławski's technique of constructing 12-note
chords. From Livre onwards, these chords tend to be subdivided into three
complementary subsets, with particular types of four-note chord characterizing
each register. The development of characteristic harmonies based on a limited
number of interval classes opened up new possibilities of harmonic contrast
and differentiation. In Preludes and Fugue (1970–72) for 13 solo strings,
sections governed by tritones and semitones alternate with others identified by
the pairing of whole tones and perfect 4ths or 5ths. This technique of
contrasting different types of interval-pairing might be viewed as providing,
within the context of an atonal language, an analogy (and compositional
substitute) for the functions of key change in a tonal language. Preludes and
Fugue is another example of the two-movement scheme. The fact that the
seven preludes can be played in any predetermined order is made possible by
the ingenious device of overlapping complementary pitch sets at the
beginnings and ends of the pieces (rather like the ‘chain’ technique which he
was to explore in the 1980s); the work can also be played in an abridged form,
with certain preludes or sections of the fugue omitted. In its complete version it
is, at around 35 minutes, the longest of Lutosławski's large-scale works.
It was Epitaph (1979) for oboe and piano that marked the turning point towards
Lutosławski's late style, which was marked above all by more transparent
harmony (with 12-note chords reserved for significant staging posts in the
form) and restraint in the use and extent of aleatory technique. The
simplification of harmony made possible an increasing use of lyrical,
expressive melodic lines projected as foreground material, while the fact that a
larger proportion of each work was written in conventional metre (rather than
aleatory counterpoint) resulted in greater rhythmic pace and energy. Many of
the late-period works allude to formal or textural aspects of Baroque music.
Lutosławski also looked back within his own output, making allusions to works
he had composed before 1960 and realizing compositional projects which had
remained unfulfilled since his youth.
Both Epitaph and Grave (1981) for cello and piano were written as memorial
tributes for friends. The more restricted palette of the duo medium appears to
have focussed the composer's attention on the relationship between melodic
foreground and harmonic accompaniment, and prompted a simpler kind of
harmony, still based on 12-note fields but less dense than in previous works.
Both Epitaph and Grave feature the alternation of sections based on
contrasted interval pairings, making particular use of the tritone-semitone
pairing which had determined the funereal character of his earlier Bartók
tribute. The form of the two pieces differs, however: Epitaph follows the pattern
of refrains and episodes which had been applied in other works, while Grave
has a scheme of ‘metamorphoses’ (corresponding to the work's subtitle) which
echoes the procedure in the second section of Musique funèbre. Epitaph acted
as a kind of compositional study for the concertante piece which followed it.
The Double Concerto (1979–80) for oboe and harp, written for Heinz and
Ursula Holliger, has some connection with the Baroque concerto grosso in its
first movement scheme of ritornello and episodes, while the final movement's
parody of a march theme, with its echoes of Prokofiev, relates back to the slow
movement of the First Symphony.
The Third Symphony (1981–3) also brings together past and present moments
within Lutosławski's creativity, incorporating as it does material conceived and
sketched during the mid- to late-1970s. It thus has a slightly hybrid quality,
whereby some passages have the more melodic focus of the late style,
whereas others represent the more dense, textural approach of the earlier
phase. Though conceived in terms of the same two-movement scheme as the
Second Symphony, it differs greatly from its predecessor, above all in that the
most memorable material comes after the climax, in the epilogue. The greater
melodic focus of the composer's late style contributes to the work's
accessibility – it has become one of the most widely performed of late-20th-
century symphonies – and helps to project a more sustained thematic
argument. In this respect it represents a return to a more traditional approach
to the form, though there are no traces of neo-romanticism, either in terms of
the work's aesthetic or its content.
The principal formal process of Lutosławski's late style was that for which he
coined the term ‘chain’ technique, to signify a form in which the beginnings and
ends of sections or strands of material overlap and interlock like the links in a
chain. Chain 1 (1983) was written for the 14 solo players of the London
Sinfonietta and thus has something of the character of large-scale chamber
music. Chain 2 (1984–5), on the other hand, is a violin concerto in all but
name. The chain technique comes in the second movement, where
successive, overlapping sections of the form are identified with strongly
contrasting intervallic combinations. Chain 2 was conceived and composed
alongside another violin work, the Partita (1984), one of the finest works of his
late period. It exists in two versions: the original, for violin and piano duo; and a
later, concertante version for violin and orchestra. It is in five movements, the
second and fourth of which are aleatory interludes which provide episodes of
repose and relaxation separating the three main movements. The title
acknowledges Lutosławski's fondness for music of the Baroque era, and
aspects of the musical content – especially as regards rhythm, phrasing and
rhythmic patterning – establish aural connections with music of that period. For
the première of Chain 2, Paul Sacher, the work's dedicatee, engaged Anne-
Sophie Mutter as soloist. So impressed was Lutosławski by her playing that he
orchestrated the Partita so that she could perform both works in the same
programme. Sacher then commissioned a short orchestral Interlude (1989) to
link the two concertante pieces. As a triptych they last some 40 minutes in
performance and occupy a unique position in the solo violin repertory.
The last major work which Lutosławski was to complete was the Fourth
Symphony (1988–92). Like the Second and Third, it is in two movements, the
second following the first without a break. Stylistically, however, it is more
homogeneous than the Third Symphony, and while most of its first movement
(like that of its predecessor) is introductory and episodic in character, it does
not open in his customary ‘hesitant’ manner, but with material of primary,
thematic significance (solo woodwind lines against sustained strings, above a
slowly pulsating bass line). The second movement, by contrast, is
developmental and climactic: its memorable features include a long, powerful,
cantando line, which unfolds sequentially, and passages of sophisticated
rhythmic layering, which superimpose in Bachian fashion three metrical layers
moving at different rates.
After this final symphonic essay, Lutosławski turned once more to the violin.
The last work he completed was Subito (1992), a four-minute test piece for the
1994 Indianapolis International Violin Competition. While recalling stylistically
the outer movements of Partita, it has more in common structurally with
Epitaph in its treatment of the refrain-episode principle. He then set to work on
a violin concerto for Mutter. The surviving bundles of sketches indicate that the
piece was to be for large orchestra (unlike Chain 2) and suggest a four-
movement structure, but the material is for the most part too fragmentary to
admit the possibility of a reconstruction. The composer left instructions that the
piece should not be completed.
Lutosławski, Witold
WORKS
orchestral
vocal
2 Sonatas, vn, pf, 1927, lost; 50 contrapuntal studies, ww, 1943–4, unpubd; Trio,
ob, cl, bn, 1944–5, unpubd, lost; Recitative e arioso, vn, pf, 1951; Bukoliki
[Bucolics], va, vc, 1962 [arr. of pf work]; Dance Preludes, cl, pf, 1954, orchd, 1955,
arr. 9 insts, 1959; Str Qt, 1964; Sacher Variation, vc, 1975; Epitaph, ob, pf, 1979;
Grave: Metamorphoses, vc, pf, 1981, orchd, 1982; Mini-Ov., hn, 2 tpt, trbn, tuba,
1982; Chain 1, chbr ens, 1983; Partita, vn, pf, 1984; Fanfare for CUBE, 1987 [for
Cambridge University Brass Ensemble]; Przezrocza [Slides], chbr ens, 1989;
Fanfare for Lancaster, brass ens, side drum, 1989; Subito, vn, pf, 1992
Pf (solo unless otherwise stated): Prelude, 1922, lost; Poème, 1928, lost; Taniec
Chimery [Dance of the Chimera], 1930, lost; Sonata, 1934, unpubd; Prelude and
Aria, 1936, unpubd; 2 Studies, 1940–41; Wariacje na temat Paganiniego [Variations
on a Theme by Paganini], 2 pf, 1941; Melodie Ludowe [Folk Melodies], 12 easy
pieces, 1945; Bukoliki, 1952; Miniatura, 2 pf, 1953; 3 Pieces for the Young, 1953;
Invention, 1968
Incid music, radio scores, songs and inst pieces based on folk material
Lutosławski, Witold
WRITINGS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
c: individual works
d: other studies