During his lifetime, Krzysztof Penderecki was undoubtedly the most famous composer in Poland, and one of the best-known contemporary composers worldwide. Thanks to its use in film and TV, from The Shining to Twin Peaks, Penderecki’s music has been heard by more people than most other avant-garde composers. His 90th anniversary provides an opportunity to reassess his work: both an exploration of historical trauma, and an investigation into our basic conceptions of what constitutes music, noise, and sound.
Beginning in the late 1950s, Penderecki burst onto the scene with dense, dissonant works using a method known as “sonorism”, emphasizing timbre and texture over harmony and melody. Works like Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima retain a raw, palpable power, their noise and volume emerging from the trauma of post-war history, in Poland and elsewhere. Penderecki became a countercultural figure, with works such as the St Luke Passion playing a politically subversive role in Poland.
But by the mid-70s he’d reinvented himself as a neo-Romantic composer of traditional forms – symphonies, requiems, concertos. Grand, serious and ambitious in a manner that resembles the unlikely influence of composers like Anton Bruckner, these works self-consciously engaged with big subjects: from Polish history and politics in the Polish Requiem, to the creation of the world itself in his operatic adaptation of Milton’s Paradise Lost.
What connects these two apparently very different aesthetics? To get some answers to this question, I spoke to music writer Tim Rutherford-Johnson, who wrote a thesis on Penderecki and has spent many years thinking about the composer’s music. Despite his fame – which extends from the counterculture to Hollywood cinema to classical concert halls worldwide – Penderecki remains an enigma, Rutherford-Johnson suggests.
“For a lot of avant-garde composers,” he says, “you can boil them down to one word. For John Cage, it’s chance. For Brian Ferneyhough, it’s complexity. I’m not sure what the one word for Penderecki would be. He shape-shifts so much that it is quite hard to describe his influence or his contribution in just one way. And I think that’s what makes him such an interesting figure.”
Penderecki’s work comes from a traumatic history: he grew up in Dębica, near the Ukrainian border, where he watched the Nazis construct a ghetto; one uncle was killed by the Nazis, one by the Soviets at Katyn. The town was largely Hasidic Jewish, with Catholics in a minority. Thirty of the forty pupils at Penderecki’s school were Jewish, all thirty suddenly disappearing when the ghetto was opened. The memory of this disappeared Jewish population, their music and culture, surfaces in a number of Penderecki’s later works.
After the war, Penderecki learned violin on an instrument his father purchased from a Russian soldier. Moving to Kraków in 1951, he studied at Jagiellonian University and the Kraków Academy of Music, where he was appointed to a teaching position in 1958.
This was an opportune time: a partial cultural thaw following the death of Stalin saw the music of the avant-garde pass through Polish musical culture like a breath of fresh air. In 1956, the Warsaw Autumn became the first avant-garde music festival in the Soviet bloc. Quickly gaining attention, the festival promoted work by Polish composers like Lutosławski, Gorecki and Penderecki, revealing an emergent Eastern European modernism distinct from that of the Darmstadt School.
Penderecki soon developed what he called a “sonoristic” style, signalled by Emanations, a work premiered at the Warsaw Autumn in 1959. Scored for two string orchestras tuned a minor second apart, Emanations used extended string techniques creating queasy, vertiginous ensemble textures: clusters, sound masses, like smears of paint on an Abstract Expressionist canvas.
Penderecki’s 1961 Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima is, Tim Rutherford-Johnson notes, essentially “a set of variations on a cluster”. The piece opens with fifty strings simultaneously playing their highest possible note. As it continues, Penderecki replaces melody, harmony and rhythm with a focus on timbre and texture that gives a raw, palpable quality to the music that can be shocking even today.
In pieces like Threnody, the musical avant-garde was a way to deal with the traumas of a history that could not yet be spoken about in official language. Penderecki recalled that he had in mind not only the atom bomb dropped on Japan, but “the destruction of the ghetto in my small native town of Dębica”.
Yet the work speaks to history, not because it attempts to represent catastrophe, but because it embraces abstraction. As Rutherford-Johnson notes, Penderecki sought “to create musical shape in the almost total absence of any traditionally recognised musical elements, and of anything recognisably programmatic or representative.” In the post-Stalinist context, its very abstraction made it a protest and an act of defiance.
Yet Penderecki increasingly felt that the sonoristic style was limited. “The early experimental pieces were short”, he noted. “I was dreaming of writing a big oratorio, but I knew that with this kind of technique, I would never be able to write a longer piece.”
In 1963 he embarked on a new work commissioned for the 700th anniversary of the Münster Cathedral. Completed in 1966, the St Luke Passion is often taken as a turning point in Penderecki’s output. The piece integrates serialism, sonorism, Bachian oratorio structures and Renaissance polyphony. Largely atonal, it ends on a resplendent E-major triad. Politically, the piece fused two areas frowned on by the Polish authorities: religion and the avant-garde. The Polish premiere of the St Luke Passion was a phenomenon, attended by a crowd of 15,000 people.