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Penderecki at Sixty: Poland's Global Voice
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10987 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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11 / 1993 |
2,593 Words |
| Author
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Tom Pniewski
Tom Pniewski is a musicologist at Hunter College in New York. |
Krzysztof Penderecki, one of the most significant composers of our time, celebrates his sixtieth birthday this month. Born in Poland, Penderecki expresses a Slavic concern with spirituality and monumentality through a musical language that is startlingly original yet also accessible. He is that rare bird, a serious modern composer who is also popular. A classic in his own time, he is the global voice of "new Poland."
The most striking characteristic of Penderecki's music, apart from its expressive power, is its sheer magnitude. Dominating his output is a gigantic Passion sequence in the mold of Bach's masterworks--a dozen large works composed over a period of twenty years that deal with the problems of violence, suffering, and death. Penderecki's music is intellectually challenging and calls for enlarged orchestras, multiple choruses, and soloists of extraordinary ability. Yet his compositions are as rewarding as they are demanding, and it is a tribute to their effectiveness that despite their physical, logistical, and economic difficulties, they are performed so often.
Penderecki was born on November 23, 1933, in Debica, a moderate-sized city about an hour's drive from Krakow, the cultural capital of ancient Poland. He grew up during the Nazi occupation. His family, consisting mostly of professionals, was spared persecution, but Krzysztof, witnessing the mass arrests of Jews, acquired early on a distaste and resentment of anything that restricted personal liberty. Young Penderecki had an uneventful early school life, but after the war distinguished himself in secondary school as a quick pupil and better-than-average violinist. Upon graduation he headed off to the music schools in Krakow.
For a while, Penderecki studied philosophy and classical Greek and Latin (a wide-ranging intellectual curiosity still drives him), but he soon completed his conservatory studies--in half the usual time. He then entered the Krakow Academy of Music as a composer, setting aside the violin, on which he had become quite proficient, to begin intense studies with Artur Malawski, a Neo-Romantic and one of the country's most important composers. After only two and a half years Malawski died, and Penderecki essentially continued working on his own, developing his own style. He graduated with distinction (his "thesis" was a memorial to his teacher, for strings and timpani) and was immediately offered a teaching post. But at the same time, he entered a nationwide competition, submitting a number of works anonymously. As it turned out, all three top prizes went to his compositions, and Penderecki immediately became one of his country's most
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