Witold Lutosławski

Witold Lutosławski, born in Warsaw in 1913, was the leading Polish composer of the twentieth century after Szymanowski and one of the most admired symphonists of his age. His youth was shadowed by catastrophe. His father was executed by the Bolsheviks in Moscow in 1918, and in the destruction of Warsaw in 1944 most of his music was lost; of the many arrangements he and Andrzej Panufnik had played as a piano duo in the city’s cafés, only his two-piano Variations on a Theme by Paganini survived. In the post-war years he worked under the constraints of Stalinist cultural policy, drawing on folk material in works such as the Concerto for Orchestra (1954) while privately developing a far more radical language. The thaw of the late 1950s liberated him: the Funeral Music for Bartók and, above all, the Jeux vénitiens of 1961 introduced his personal brand of controlled chance, or ‘aleatoricism’: passages in which players are given fixed material but coordinate freely rather than in strict time, producing shimmering, unpredictable textures while the composer retains command of harmony and form. From this came his mature style, built on intricately layered chromatic harmony and the so-called ‘chain’ technique of overlapping musical strands. An elegant, fastidious craftsman and a distinguished conductor of his own music, Lutosławski won major international honours, among them the Grawemeyer Award, and remained, to the end, a model of artistic integrity. He died in Warsaw in 1994, his Fourth Symphony among his last completed works.