Witold Lutosławski

Witold Lutosławski was one of the most important Polish composers of the twentieth century. To understand the full value of his music, we must consider it from several angles, giving attention to his personal life, as well as to the many stylistic and aesthetic trends that characterized twentieth-century music. The story of Lutosławski’s work follows the changing phases of his own biography, the tumultuous flow of transformations in world music, and the broader perspective of historical events that so painfully marked his life and work.

Lutosławski grew to artistic adulthood in Warsaw, where he had been born and to which, after a period in Moscow, he returned after the First World War. His Moscow period had been marred by intense personal drama: both his father and his uncle were shot by firing squad by the Bolsheviks for their patriotic commitment to the National-Democratic Party. Although Lutosławski rarely spoke of it, this tragic event surely left a lasting impression on his psyche and, indirectly, on his artistic expression.

Lutosławski’s only composition teacher was Witold Maliszewski, a conservative artist who had trained within the milieu of Russian post-Romanticism. Lutosławski earned a diploma in piano from the Warsaw Conservatory in 1936 and received a degree in composition the following year. Among the compositions he submitted for his second degree was his Lacrimosa for soprano and orchestra. His Symphonic Variations (1936-1938) are emblematic of this period and premiered just before the outbreak of the Second World War in June 1939, conducted by Grzegorz Fitelberg at Wawel Castle in Kraków.

Maliszewski seems to have been little inclined to encourage his disciple’s experiments with new sounds, but he imparted to Lutosławski an excellent knowledge of compositional technique. He also taught him an approach to form that, drawing on Classical and Romantic traditions — especially Haydn and Beethoven — helped Lutosławski develop his own conception of musical “action,” a term that came from Maliszewski’s lessons on form in Beethoven’s sonatas. These models energized Lutosławski’s imagination, and he transformed them within his own musical language, especially in large symphonic and vocal-instrumental works.

Between tradition and modernity

The legacy of the Classical Viennese tradition became ubiquitous in Lutosławski’s creative consciousness, compositional approach, and aesthetic outlook. In addition to a sensitivity to form, Lutosławski had an exceptional sense of sound order, of sound organized in service of both beauty and deep emotion. “No succession of sounds,” he explained,

no consonance can come to life, if the details of expression, color, character, and physiognomy are not taken into consideration. Even the smallest element must satisfy a composer’s sensibilities to the utmost. In other words, there can be no indifferent sounds in music.¹

However much he drew from historical models, Lutosławski remained a modern composer. The new music surrounding him from the time of his youth was a challenge he could not ignore. Among his earliest influences was Karol Szymanowski. After Szymanowski’s early death in 1937, Lutosławski paid homage to him in an essay titled “Tchnienie wielkości” [A breath of greatness: About Karol Szymanowski].² He was the most affected by Szymanowski’s Symphony No. 3, “Song of the Night,” and later recalled, “When I heard Symphony No. 3 at the age of eleven, all of modern music, all of the world of the twentieth century, suddenly opened up before me.”³ Over time, however, his youthful fascinations gave way to his own creative visions. Lutosławski explained: “I soon […] reacted against Szymanowski and began to reject the excessively romantic and expressionist aspects of his music. At the time, they felt completely alien to me.”⁴

Lutosławski’s early compositions display clear constructivist traits that align with the neoclassical current then shaping European music. In particular, he looked to the Classical heritage of the past, for models of form and texture, adapting them in ways that gave his music a sense of timeless and universality. Yet his engagement with neoclassicism differed from that of slightly older Polish composers such as Grażyna Bacewicz, Michał Spisak, and Stefan Kisielewski, who had each traveled to Paris to expand their knowledge in the renowned studio of Nadia Boulanger.

The outbreak of the Second World War upended Lutosławski’s life. After briefly participating in the fighting in 1939, he returned to Warsaw, where he lived under the daily terror of the Nazi occupation. The only work he could find in music was as a pianist in the city’s cafés. He shared this professional fate with Andrzej Panufnik, and together they wrote and performed arrangements from the Classical repertoire. Almost all of their work was burned during the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, except for Variations on a Theme by Paganini for two pianos (1941), transcribed in 1977-1978 for piano and orchestra.

The years of the Nazi occupation suspended activities in Warsaw’s main musical institutions, but did not keep Lutosławski from his own musical work. In 1941, he began composing his first piece for large orchestra, Symphony No. 1. He completed it only in 1947, by which time he was living in a postwar reality that would soon reveal the new set of inconveniences of composing under Soviet cultural policies based in socialist realism.

Imposed unilaterally, the doctrine of socialist realism was outlined in 1949 in a conference held in Łagów Lubuski, echoing a similar meeting held in Prague a year prior. Both conferences clearly indicated the arrival of the Iron Curtain, behind which composers in Eastern Europe were not only isolated from Western musical innovations, but also pressured to toe certain political lines. Artists who wished to maintain their creative independence found themselves facing a dramatic choice: leave their country indefinitely (the path taken by Panufnik and Roman Palester, for example) or stay and devote their musical life to folk-inspired compositions.

Lutosławski chose the second option. In 1948, even before the Łagów conference, he had already experienced the consequences of the new cultural climate. After the Katowice premiere of his First Symphony — a masterful composition that hewed to the classic canons of form and texture — critics condemned the work as “too formalist.” Within the doctrine of socialist realism, the label “formalist” stigmatized music that failed to conform to official aesthetic demands and could effectively marginalize the composer who wrote it. Lutosławski soon found himself in precisely that position.

The late 1940s and early 1950s thus became a period of “deliberate compromise.”⁵ His work as a composer was limited to two paths. The first, writing for children and youth and composing songs and theater and variety music, he did under the pseudonym Derwid. Highlights among these pieces include Popular Melodies for Piano (1945); Słomkowy lańcuszek (Straw Chain) and other children’s pieces for soprano, mezzo-soprano, and chamber ensemble (1950-1951); Bucoliques for piano (1952); and Dance Preludes (1954). The other path allowed him to continue writing for larger ensembles: Overture for Strings (1949), Little Suite for orchestra (1950-1951), and Silesian Triptych for soprano and orchestra (1951). With the exception of the Overture, which has constructivist traits and reveals Lutosławski’s study of different modes of musical expression, these works remain carefully within a populist voice. Yet his references to Polish folk music were more than a concession to the Soviet state’s prescribed aesthetic. They also drew on a much older Polish tradition, one given renewed authority in the work of Szymanowski.

The crowning piece in Lutosławski’s experiments with traditional folk music is his Concerto for Orchestra (1950-1954), remarkable both for its imaginative treatment of folk-inspired material and for its orchestration. The work also shows that folk music was more than a convenient means of navigating the period’s artistic strictures. Some scholars have identified in the Concerto early signs of the two-part form Lutosławski would go on to develop in the 1960s.

From socialist realism to controlled randomness

The first major turning point in Lutosławski’s creative development came in the mid-1950s, following the political shifts of the famous “Polish October” of 1956. Although these reforms did not overturn the communist regime, they relaxed the constraints of socialist realism. For Polish composers, the resulting “Thaw” reopened access to developments in Western music and, more importantly, made room for individual creative inquiry and experimentation.

The premiere of Musique funèbre for string orchestra (1954-1958), written in memory of Béla Bartók, at Warsaw Autumn gave witness to this political sea change. Intensely expressive, the work introduced new ideas drawn from a twelve-tone row that Lutosławski transformed both horizontally as melody and vertically as harmony. His musical sketches, now housed in the Paul Sacher Archives in Basel, Switzerland, reveal that he had been exploring serial technique for several years before he could acknowledge it publicly.

A second turning point came in 1960, when Lutosławski’s musical language began to evolve in two distinct directions. The first grew out of Western avant-garde experimentation, particularly with chance procedures. Partly in response to the success of John Cage’s indeterminate works, Lutosławski developed his own method, which he called “controlled aleatorism.” In this approach, chance determines much of the rhythmic structure, while pitch and harmony remain firmly under the composer’s control. Lutosławski explored this technique in Venetian Games for chamber orchestra (1960-1961), his String Quartet (1964), and Symphony No. 2 (1965-1967). In these works, strictly measured a battuta sections alternate with freer ad libitum blocks. These passages, with their shifting rhythms and sparkling sounds, recall the mobile sculptures of Alexander Calder.

Controlled aleatorism continued to appear, in varying degrees, in several of Lutosławski’s later works. Yet it rested on the conviction that musical structure and its aesthetic effects should result from the composer’s concerted effort, not from responsibility ceded to the performer.

The two-part form as musical dramaturgy

The second direction in which Lutosławski’s language evolved pertained to two-part form. In this original design, an opening movement, sometimes described as “hesitant,” introduces the work’s sound world through fragments of its contours, motifs, and phrases. A main second movement then brings that material into sharper focus, allowing it to emerge in full splendor as the subject of what Lutosławski called musical “dramaturgy.” His String Quartet and his Symphony No. 2 are classic examples of this two-part form.

Lutosławski’s mature idiom crystallized in a series of compositions from the late 1960s and 1970s. At first glance, the Concerto for Cello and Orchestra (1969-1970) seems to follow the classic dialogue between soloist and orchestra. In performance, however, that dialogue becomes a contrast-filled drama, moving from moments of calm to eruptions of the most unexpected despair. Livre pour orchestre (1968) displays the richness of Lutosławski’s orchestral language during this period. Built largely on twelve-tone clusters, the piece moves beyond equal temperament through a use of microtones. Its strikingly colorful sonorities come from imaginative combinations of instrumental groups and isolated instruments. Other major symphonic works from this period include Preludes and Fugue for thirteen solo strings (1970-1972), Mi-parti (1975-1976), and Novelette (1979).

The vocal and instrumental compositions from the late 1950s and early 1960s form a category of their own. In Five Melodies on Texts of Kazimiera Iłłakowicz: The Sea, The Wind, Winter, Knights, and Church Bells (1958), twelve-tone technique merges perfectly with extraordinary sensitivity to poetic tone, reflected in the colors of the orchestra.

Lutosławski turned to texts by French surrealist poets for works such as Trois poèmes d’Henri Michaux for choir and orchestra (1961-1963), Paroles tissées (“Woven Words”) for tenor and chamber orchestra, with texts by Jean-François Chabrun (1965), and Les Espaces du sommeil for baritone and orchestra, after texts by Robert Desnos (1975). Rich vocal and instrumental colors recall the Impressionist tradition, yet their power relies not only on sonority. Lutosławski fuses music and language into a new expressive whole, following a trail of poetic associations to create a surreal, dreamlike world.

“Simple textures” and melodic line

In the 1960s, Lutosławski drew on both his own explorations and the musical language of the Western avant-garde. He nonetheless maintained a certain distance from the West, appreciating the significance of its radical innovations but also remaining sharply aware of their fleeting, ephemeral nature. “Novelty,” he wrote,

is what ages the fastest in a work of art. My musical explorations do not seek novelty for itself. The technical means I look for can be used more than once and will remain in the new repertoire of expressive possibilities. In other words, I am seeking enduring values that do not immediately go stale.⁶

Perhaps it was this attitude that pushed him to examine his own work and search for ways to restore melody to its leading role; he also began to limit his use of twelve-tone harmony in favor of more euphonious sounds connected to tonal structures. He opened a path toward certain archetypes of the past, marked by his Double Concerto for oboe, harp, and chamber orchestra (1979-1980). For the first time since he had begun using ultramodern musical ideas, he borrowed from the Baroque: namely, concertante writing and predominantly linear textures rather than blocks of sound. Focusing on line allowed him to highlight melody as a traditional means of expression.

The significance Lutosławski assigned to this work stands out in a series of compositions that premiered in the late 1970s and early 1980s, including Epitaph for oboe and piano (1979), Grave: Metamorphoses for Cello and Piano (1981), and Partita for violin and piano (1984). Their reduced instrumentation highlights what he called “thin texture” and a return to the traditional melodic line. Just as he had borrowed from the avant-garde in ways that preserved his individuality, Lutosławski now achieved a synthesis of traditional elements and the language he had developed over the previous years.

This synthesis took several forms. On the largest scale, the monumental Symphony No. 3 (1972-1983) brings together twelve-tone harmony, new approaches to texture and tone, thematic development, and the sonata-form archetype from the Classical and Romantic traditions. A second strand reaches back to nineteenth-century piano virtuosity. The Concerto for Piano (1987-1988) takes up models from Chopin, Liszt, and Brahms, but without becoming a postmodern “game” of borrowed conventions. Lutosławski remains faithful to his own stylistic tools, particularly harmonic and pitch organization, formal arc, and impressionistic color.

The chain form

In his later compositions, Lutosławski focused on what he called “chain form” and sound movement. In this technique, separate layers and links are developed (that is, begin and end) independently, constituting distinct musical “actions,” so to speak. He explored this idea in a cycle of three pieces: Chain 1 for chamber orchestra (1983); Chain 2, a dialogue, or essentially a short concerto, for violin and orchestra (1984-1985); and Chain 3 for orchestra (1986). The different instrumentation in these pieces allowed Lutosławski to present the chain technique in several textures, from fine melodic lines to more developed orchestral writing.

His final works return to two genres that had occupied him almost from the beginning of his creative career: vocal-instrumental music and symphonic music. In the first category are works such as Chantefleurs et Chantefables (1989-1990), a song cycle for soprano and orchestra using poetry by Desnos. The work reflects Lutosławski’s love for the internal “musicality” of French poetry and his enduring passion for composing children’s music, a genre that had formed a significant portion of his output during the difficult decade after the Second World War.

In the second category is Symphony No. 4 (1988-92), completed two years before Lutosławski’s death. The work continues with the two-part form while presenting an extraordinary sound world, in which muted, mysterious harmonies intertwine with a precise and pastel-colored melody.

When interviewed about his artistic heritage, Lutosławski described himself as the artistic heir of Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, Igor Stravinsky, and Bela Bartók, all of whom linked the sensual values of music — particularly color and tone — with technical prowess. It is well known that the serialism practiced by the Vienna School — Arnold Schönberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern — never attempted this. While he experimented with twelve-tone writing throughout his career, Lutosławski never turned it into a cornerstone of his work. Music made by intellectual calculus alone did not interest him. To the contrary, he sought emotional and sensory richness within a minutely constructed sound order, and took full responsibility for the act of creation, as much for himself as for his listeners. He was particularly sensitive to writing music that would endure. By combining a modern sound world with values from musical traditions both near and far, Lutosławski became one of the twentieth century’s most distinctive and eminent composers.

^{1. Bálint András VARGA, Lutosławski Profile, London, Chester Music, 1976, p. 41.↩}

^{2. Cf. Muzyka Polska 1937, nº 3, p. 169–170.↩}

^{3. VARGA, op. cit., p. 19.↩}

^{4. Ibid., p. 5.↩}

^{5. Jean-Paul COUCHOUD, La musique polonaise et Witold Lutosławski, Paris, Stock, 1981, p. 83.↩}

^{6. Witold LUTOSŁAWSKI, Zeszyt myśli [Le cahier de pensées], manuscript, Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel, note from 10 October 1962.↩}