Obituary

Composer-conductor Krzysztof Penderecki broke boundaries with experimental works

Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki conducting China's National Symphonic Orchestra in Beijing in 2011.
Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki conducting China's National Symphonic Orchestra in Beijing in 2011. PHOTO: EPA-EFE

Krzysztof Penderecki, a Polish composer and conductor whose modernist works jumped from the concert hall to popular culture, turning up in soundtracks for films like The Exorcist (1973) and The Shining (1980) and influencing a generation of edgy rock musicians, died on Sunday at his home in Krakow.

He was 86.

His death was confirmed by Andrzej Giza, director of the Ludwig van Beethoven Association, which was founded by Penderecki's wife, Elzbieta. Penderecki was regarded as Poland's pre-eminent composer for more than half a century and, in all those years, he never seemed to sit still.

Beginning in the 1960s with radical ideas that placed him firmly in the avant garde, he went on to produce dozens of compositions including eight symphonies, four operas, a requiem and other choral works, and several concertos he cheerfully described as being almost impossible to play.

Among those who could were violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter and cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, whose recordings of the concertos he wrote for them won Grammy Awards in 1999 and 1988 respectively.

Penderecki was most widely known for choral compositions evoking Poland's ardent Catholicism and history of foreign domination and for his early experimental works, with their massive tone clusters and disregard for melody and harmony.

Those ideas would reverberate for decades after he himself had pronounced them "more destructive than constructive" and changed course towards neo-Romanticism.

Still, it was compositions from the wild first decade of his career, including Threnody For The Victims Of Hiroshima (1960), Polymorphia (1961) and the St Luke Passion (1966) that brought him lasting international recognition while he was still a young man.

The threnody, in particular, is a much-studied example of startling emotional effects created from abstract concepts.

Following a score that often looks more like geometry homework than conventional notation, it forces an ensemble of 52 string instruments to produce relentless, nerve-jangling sounds that can suggest nuclear annihilation.

Yet it was said Penderecki dedicated it to the victims of Hiroshima only after hearing the piece performed.

Though he wrote little expressly for movies, film directors picked up on Penderecki. His compositions could perfectly amplify scenes of dread, horror, murder and mayhem.

His music can be heard in Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island (2010), Peter Weir's Fearless (1993), David Lynch's Wild At Heart (1990) and Inland Empire (2006) and, of course, Stanley Kubrick's The Shining and William Friedkin's The Exorcist.

Penderecki also appealed to many a pop musician. Artists as disparate as Kele Okereke of Bloc Party and Robbie Robertson of The Band professed to have been inspired by him.

But his influence is most directly evident in the music of Jonny Greenwood, the classically trained guitarist of Radiohead. Greenwood's own score for the movie There Will Be Blood (2007), for example, features his Popcorn Superhet Receiver, a work directly inspired by the Hiroshima threnody.

According to an account in The Guardian, the two composers first met after a concert, when Greenwood, in his words, went to shake Penderecki's hand "like a sad fanboy".

They later pursued a collaboration culminating in 2011 with a series of concerts that included both Polymorphia and Greenwood's work for strings, 48 Responses To Polymorphia.

Penderecki was pleased. Nine thousand young people packed the auditorium at the first performance in Wroclaw "and they had never heard about this old guy Penderecki's music".

Sometimes, he was famous for the wrong reasons, like missing due dates, as with his commission from the Lyric Opera of Chicago to write a new work for the American Bicentennial in 1976.

While American composers fumed over the choice of a foreigner to do the job, the fearless Penderecki envisioned something grand: a kind of oratorio-opera drawn from John Milton's epic Paradise Lost, with an English libretto by Christopher Fry using much of the original text.

Alas, it could not be done in time for the Bicentennial and the premiere was delayed until November 1978. In the end, the critics did not much like it.

But then, opera had been his most troublesome genre. Even The Devils Of Loudun (1969), his first opera and the most popular, got mixed reviews and two thumbs down from the Vatican, which tried in vain to keep the composer from going ahead with his interpretation of a 17th-century scandal in the church.

Born on Nov 23, 1933, in Debica, in south-eastern Poland, to Tadeusz, a lawyer, and Zofia Penderecki, he became a prosperous man, living in a manor house on 8ha in Lutoslawice, Poland, that he lovingly developed as an arboretum.

He had as many commissions as he could handle and enjoyed a lucrative overlapping career as conductor of the Krakow Symphony and frequent guest conductor abroad.

Besides his wife of more than 50 years, Elzbieta, he is survived by their children, Lukasz and Dominika, and a daughter from his first marriage, Beata.

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A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Straits Times on April 02, 2020, with the headline Composer-conductor Krzysztof Penderecki broke boundaries with experimental works. Subscribe