Witold Lutosławski

Polish classical composer

• Born: January 25, 1913
• Birthplace: Warsaw, Poland, Russian Empire (now in Poland)
• Died: February 7, 1994
• Place of death: Warsaw, Poland

An important Polish composer, Lutosławski is best known for his lush orchestral sound, his command of gesture and proportion, and introducing aleatoric, or chance, principles within a tightly controlled formal environment.

The Life

The younger son of Jósef Lutosławski and Maria Olszewska, Witold Lutosławski (VEE-tohlt loo-toh-SWAWF-skee) at an early age lost his father. Having demonstrated musical talent, he began taking piano lessons at the age of six, first with Helena Hoffman and later with Jozef Smidowicz, and he also studied the violin with Lidia Kmitowa, followed by composition studies with Witold Maliszewski, both privately and at the Warsaw Conservatory. In the early 1930’s he studied mathematics at the University of Warsaw. Upon his graduation from the Warsaw Conservatory, he intended to further his composition studies in Paris, a tradition for Polish composers going back to Frédéric Chopin, since the musical scene in Poland had not much to offer, especially in contemporary music. Instead, because of the political situation in Poland, he went through military training and German imprisonment, escaping back to Warsaw. At the time the city was culturally deprived by wartime occupation, and he experienced a period of hardship, playing piano in cafés, as this was the only way to make a living from music. After the war Lutosławski married Maria Danuta Bogusławska, and they settled in a small, noisy apartment in Warsaw in 1946. Lutosławski supported them at first by composing utilitarian music for Polish radio, as well as scores for theater and film, an activity he continued until 1960 and that sustained him also during the years of Communist censorship (1949-1954), when his Symphony No. 1 was banned as formalist and decadent. He continued to develop his contemporary idiom mostly in secrecy. He was active in the Polish Composers’ Union and a co-organizer of the Warsaw Autumn Contemporary Music Festival. After 1955, having already traveled briefly to the West for festivals and conferences, his reputation abroad started gaining momentum, and his Funeral Music was performed widely in Europe and the United States. By 1961 his international success was rapidly growing with many important performances (especially of Venetian Games) and guest lectures.

Lutosławski was not drawn to teaching, considering himself weak in that area, and he never held a permanent teaching appointment, but he participated in several composition festivals and workshops, most notably at Tanglewood in the Berkshires of Massachusetts, at the Royal Swedish Academy of Music, at the University of Texas at Austin, and in Arhus, Denmark. During the 1970’s and 1980’s, he gave several guest lectures on his music around the world. Many universities have granted Lutosławski honorary doctorate degrees, including, among others, the universities of Warsaw, Chicago, Cambridge, Jagiellonian in Kraków, and McGill in Montreal. Though he was always involved in conducting his own music, as far back as the early radio and film scores, starting in 1963 Lutosławski embarked on an international conducting career of his own music that took him to France, Czechoslovakia, The Netherlands, Norway, Austria, and the United States, leading such prestigious orchestras as the Los Angeles Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, BBC Symphony, London Sinfonietta, Orchestre de Paris, and others. He also remained active as a pianist, and the piano always featured prominently in his compositions.

Lutosławski enjoyed wide success and received many prizes and honors. Among his accolades were the UNESCO Prize (1959, 1968); the French order of Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres (1982); the Royal Philharmonic Society Gold Medal (1986); the Koussevitzky Prize (1964, 1976, 1986); the Maurice Ravel Prize (1971); the Jean Sibelius Prize (1973); and the Award of the Polish Composers’ Union (1959, 1973). In the last year of his life, Lutosławski was awarded the highest state prize in Poland, the Order of the White Eagle. Beginning in 1990 the National Philharmonic in Warsaw has held the Lutosławski International Competition for Composers.

The Music

Constant development and shifts in Lutosławski’s stylistic nuances throughout his career reveal a maturing musical language, manifested by marked differences among the works in his oeuvre. Nevertheless, his body of work maintains a remarkably cohesive unity of personal character and individuality. Partly because of his earlier cultural isolation from the Western avant-garde, and partly because of personal choice, he did not surrender to musical trends or schools, maintaining a healthy mix of tradition and innovation, guided by his refined artistic sense. His works are balanced between form and content, driven by a strong dramatic sense, both intellectual and enjoyable at the same time. His form is usually in two large sections, and often there is a catastrophic climax that determines what will happen to the material.

Lutosławski’s output can be divided into several periods, in regard to his stylistic development and ways of organizing pitch material. While his control of all other parameters was always tight and mature, even in his early works, it is interesting to note that it was in the realm of pitch organization that the composer constantly evolved. As he discovered new techniques, he did not abandon his old ways but rather incorporated the new into the existing and intensified the contrast for formal reasons.

Early Works. Among these, pieces such as Symphonic Variations, Symphony No. 1, and Overture for Strings are mostly neoclassical. He then developed a clear, fresh tonality inspired by Polish folklore and clearly related to late Béla Bartók, manifested in his Little Suite, Dance Preludes, and Concerto. The high level of discipline exemplified in these pieces explains the composer’s relatively small output during these years. The use of opposing, unrelated harmonic areas for dramatic potential was a principle he used throughout his life.

Dodecaphonic Pieces. Lutosławski’s Five Songs and Funeral Music belong to his serial-technique-dominated period. Funeral Music is clearly a culmination of sorts. It was composed for the tenth anniversary of Bartók’s death and took Lutosławski four years to complete, marking an artistic crisis for the composer, mostly spent deciding on his own relationship to the twelve-tone technique. His solution eventually involved treating the twelve tones as a harmonic field, with tight intervallic control, without letting go of his earlier sense of proportion, in this piece manifested with formal designs around a golden section. From then on, another common technique was to segregate pitch sets into a harmonic and melodic set, each with a different number of elements. Lutosławski was always aware of the total chromatic set of pitches, but he generally rejected the idea of using ordered sets (tone rows). One could argue that this concept of tone collections rather than tone rows transferred to the vertical dimension was the inspiration for his controlled aleatoric principle, his next and most important innovation.

Controlled Aleatorism Period. Beginning with Venetian Games, Lutosławski’s compositional technique, influenced by the works of John Cage, adopted an element of controlled chance in rhythmic structure, which, unlike Cage, did not relinquish tight control of musical parameters to the performers, but merely allowed for some limited freedom in the order or density of pitches played, always within a precise temporal framework.

Symphony No. 2 and Livre. These works represent a summary of his attempts to develop his own formal model. Formally, these works are mostly organized in two parts: an introduction followed by the development of the main idea. With this stylistic milestone, Lutosławski reached a maturity within his own work and a stylistic stability for the rest of his composing life that built upon synthesizing his different technical resources into his late style. Most of his subsequent works were set for large forces, fully chromatic, finely orchestrated in a manner suggesting French impressionist composers and formally emerging from an opposition between aleatory and metrical textures.

The Chain Principle. The work Mi-parti exhibits another structural concept typical for Lutosławski, based on the introduction of several interlocking themes that create a chain structure. This formal principle is clearly present in three consecutively numbered works titled Chain, and the composer found it useful in writing concerti-type pieces, where he could maximize the opposition between a soloist and an ensemble and maintain more than one musical narrative.

Chantefleurs et chantefables. Orchestral song cycles hold a special place in Lutosławski’s oeuvre. The composer set poems by the French surrealist Robert Desnos twice (the other one being Spaces of Sleep), drawn by the poet’s arresting simplicity of language. Lutosławski’s settings are colorful, demonstrating his mastery of handling the fragile equilibrium between the vocal and orchestral texture.

Musical Legacy

Lutosławski has secured a prominent place among twentieth century composers because of his artistic integrity and honesty and because of the technical command of his own compositional language. His sense of proportion and dramatic conflict generate an incredibly fluid yet tightly controlled form. His sensitivity to sound as an entity directly relate to and affect all other aspects of form. His ability to unite all these complex elements organically into a musical dialectic that is not based on preexisting syntactical systems is what distinguishes Lutosławski from a number of his peers who embraced, even if skillfully so, trends of their times. His music, however, is not perceived as removed from the tradition in which he was nourished. That is because he transcended his heritage by renewing and developing its very essence: the idea of a dramatic form that comes from opposition and conflict, the idea of a division into unequal yet complementary forces striving to reunite, and the very essence of treating material organically for its own sake, in a unique way every time.

Principal Works

cello work:Sacher Variation, 1975.

chamber works:Symphonic Variations, 1938; Trio, 1945 (for oboe, clarinet, and bassoon); Mala suita, 1950 (Little Suite); Preludia taneczne, 1954 (Dance Preludes; for clarinet and piano); Gry weneckie, 1961 (Venetian Games); String Quartet, 1964; Epitaph, 1979 (for oboe and piano); Double Concerto, 1980 (for oboe, harp, and chamber orchestra); Mini Overture, 1982 (for brass quintet); Partita, 1984 (for violin and piano); Chain II, 1985 (for violin and chamber orchestra); Przezrocza, 1989 (Slides); Subito, 1992 (for violin and piano).

choral works:Lacrimosa, 1937 (for soprano, optional chorus, and orchestra); Trois Poèmes d’Henri Michaux, 1963 (Three Poems by Henri Michaux; for chorus and orchestra).

orchestral works:Suita Warszawska, 1946 (Warsaw Suite); Symphony No. 1, 1947; Overture for Strings, 1949; Concerto, 1954; Muzyka zalobna, 1958 (Funeral Music; for string orchestra); Three Postludes, 1963; Symphony No. 2, 1967; Livre, 1968; Cello Concerto, 1970; Preludes and Fugue, 1972 (for thirteen solo strings); Mi-parti, 1976; Novelette, 1979; Grave: Metamorphoses, 1981 (for cello and string orchestra); Chain I, 1983; Symphony No. 3, 1983; Chain II, 1986; Chain III, 1986; Fanfare for Louisville, 1986 (for woodwind, brass, and percussion); Partita, 1988 (for violin and orchestra); Piano Concerto, 1988; Interlude, 1989; Prelude for G.S.M.D., 1989; Symphony No. 4, 1992.

piano works:Wariacje na temat Paganiniego, 1941 (Variations on a Theme of Paganini); Melodie Ludowe, 1945 (Folk Melodies); Bukoliki, 1952 (Bucolics).

vocal works:Piesni walki podziemnej, 1944 (Songs of the Underground Struggle; for voice and piano); Dwadziescie koled, 1946 (Twenty Polish Christmas Carols; for voice and piano); Children’s Songs, 1949 (for violin, voice, and piano); Tryptyk Slaski, 1951 (Silesian Triptych; for soprano and orchestra); Five Songs, 1957 (for soprano and piano); Paroles tissées, 1965 (Woven Words; for tenor and chamber orchestra); Les Espaces du sommeil, 1975 (Spaces of Sleep; for baritone and orchestra); Chantefleurs et chantefables, 1991 (for soprano and chamber orchestra).

Bibliography

Nikolska, Irina, and Witold Lutosławski. Conversations with Witold Lutosławski, 1987-1992. Stockholm: Melos, 1994. An informative round of discussions about the composer’s views and aesthetic choices, addressed to the general reader. The composer discusses his approach to composing as it developed in relation to specific works.

Rae, Charles Bodman. The Music ofLutosławski. London: Omnibus Press, 1999. An in-depth biographical and analytical look into Lutosławski, covering all of his works, addressed to the musically educated reader. Rae’s insight is enhanced by access to the composer and his sketches.

Skowron, Zbigniew, ed. Lutosławski Studies. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1999. A collection of essays by prominent Lutosławski scholars, writing on various topics and works of the composer.

Stucky, Stephen. Lutosławski and His Music. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1981. The quintessential comprehensive study of Lutosławski’s music by Cornell professor and renowned composer Stucky. Includes analyses, diagrams, excerpts, and a comprehensive list of available scholarship on Lutosławski in several languages.