Krzysztof Penderecki

Krzysztof Penderecki (1933–2020) was a Polish composer and conductor. Born in Dębica in south-eastern Poland, he learned the violin as a boy and studied composition at the Academy of Music in Kraków with Artur Malawski and Stanisław Wiechowicz, joining its teaching staff in 1958. In 1959 he entered three pieces anonymously in a national competition for young composers and won the first three prizes. The Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima for 52 strings (1960) and the St Luke Passion (1966) made him one of the best-known figures of the European avant-garde. From the mid-1970s, beginning with his First Violin Concerto, he wrote in a more traditional, late-Romantic idiom; the Polish Requiem, begun in 1980, belongs to these years. He taught at Yale University in the 1970s and conducted widely. Film directors borrowed his early music: it is heard in The Exorcist and in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.