Krzysztof Penderecki

• Period: Contemporary (1950- )
• Country: Poland
• Born: November 23, 1933 in Debica, Poland
• Genres: Chamber Music, Choral Music, Concerto, Opera, Orchestral Music, Symphony, Vocal Music

Biography

One of the best known, most listened to, and most popular composers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Krzysztof Penderecki has undergone a marked evolution in compositional style. After achieving fame with such astringent, often anguished, scores as his Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima (1960) and Passion According to St. Luke (1965), both of which stretched tonal language, Penderecki followed a personal imperative in moving toward more tonal music. As early as 1980, his Symphony No. 2 embraced pre-serialist notions of melody and harmony. This fertile exploration of traditional language has continued to yield rewarding works into the new millennium. Penderecki was given violin and piano lessons as a child. He studied art and literary history and philosophy at the local university while also attending the Kraków Conservatory. He privately studied composition before he entered the Kraków State Academy of Music in 1954. In 1959, three of his compositions, each submitted under pseudonyms, won first prizes in a competition sponsored by the Polish Composer's Union. Fame rapidly followed. Both his Threnody and St. Luke Passion received worldwide performances in numbers rare for contemporary works, especially those written with such demanding techniques: glissandi, tonal clusters, unpitched sounds, spoken interjections, aleatoric effects, and shouting. Commissions came in quick succession, a corollary career as a lecturer developed, and in 1972, Penderecki began to conduct his own works. The first of Penderecki's stage works, The Devils of Loudon, became a European sensation in 1969 with numerous performances and considerable discussion. A second opera, one of epic scale, was commissioned by the Chicago Lyric Opera. Paradise Lost (after Milton) was mounted in 1976 in an immensely expensive production seen in Chicago and Italy. Die schwarze Maske was premiered in 1986, followed in 1991 by the comic work Ubu Rex. Penderecki is among the most honored composers ever. He holds honorary memberships in many of the world's most prestigious conservatories, awards from numerous competitions, several honorary doctorates, and has been recognized with national orders from such nations as Germany, Austria, and his native Poland. Since his conducting debut, he has been a respected podium figure, leading both his own works and a variety of music by other composers representing several centuries. The North German Radio Symphony Orchestra, Hamburg engaged him as principal guest conductor. Though not extraordinarily prolific, Penderecki has amassed a sizeable catalog of orchestral works, chamber music, concertos, and choral works. ~ Erik Eriksson, All Music Guide

Discography

Orff: Carmina Burana Buy this CD	Penderecki: Clarinet Concerto; Flute Concerto; Agnus Dei [Special Edition] Buy this CD	Penderecki: Cello Concerto; Partita; Symphony; Threnody Buy this CD	Penderecki: Capriccio; De Natura Sonoris II; Piano Concerto [Special Edition] Buy this CD	Penderecki: Seven Gates of Jerusalem Buy this CD
Penderecki: Symphony No. 2; Sacred Works Buy this CD

• Born: Nov 23, 1933 in Debica, Poland
• Occupation: Actor
• Active: '60s, '90s-2000s
• Major Genres: Drama, Music
• Career Highlights: Rece do Góry, The Saragossa Manuscript, Katyn
• First Major Screen Credit: The Saragossa Manuscript (1965)

Biography

After early private study in composition, Penderecki enrolled at Kraków University. In 1959, he wrote three outstandingly innovative and prize-winning compositions: "The Psalms of David" for chorus and percussion, the orchestral Emanations, and an Epitaph in Memoriam Artur Malawski. He soon became internationally known for his Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima for 52 solo strings (1960) and the St. Luke Passion (1963-1965). These works contain astonishing timbres: bizarre air-raid siren-like string glissandi, icy harmonics, thunderous percussion, undulating surfaces, and breaking sounds (finger snaps on strings, col legno battuta, etc.). He also integrated delicate sounds (such as in De Natura Sonoris No. 1 and No. 2) and drew on Roman and Orthodox chant. These works have an appealing directness, sometimes verging on the crude or grotesque as in the opera The Devils of Loudon (1968), that has made Penderecki popular. These early pieces have been employed more or less as "sound effects" in sci-fi and horror films. The composer may have unknowingly encouraged these associations through his own titles, unlike the program-less "purity" of Stockhausen and John Cage, for example. Penderecki's later style, as in the excellent symphonies, re-defines tonality and melody.

Most films that use Penderecki's music quote pre-existing works, but his first two soundtracks for director Wojciech Has were original scores: the mysterious and surreal Saragossa Manuscript (1965), structured as stories-within-a-story in the Inquisition era, and Szyfry (1966) (aka The Codes). Alain Resnais' Je t'aime, Je t'aime (1968) contrasted Penderecki quotes with Thelonious Monk's Misterioso.

Two horror films, successful both in their popularity and aesthetic achievement, employed quotes from Penderecki works: William Friedkin's The Exorcist (1973), and Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980) together with the television piece Making the Shining (1980). Both employ Penderecki's music as a sort of sound-effects grab bag for moments of building mystery and accentuations or "stabs" at tense moments; for example, the string snapping sounds that serve as segues in The Shining and the random string pizzicati and massed dissonances that underscore the terrifying hallucinations of Wendy Torrance (Shelley Duvall) as she is running from her deranged husband (Jack Nicholson), the gushing torrents of blood that fill the hotel corridor, and so on. In Jerzy Skolimowski's one-time censored Rece do gory (1981) (aka Hands Up!), that travels back and forth between decades, Penderecki's music underscores a sci-fi motif and the ruins of Lebanon.

Penderecki appears in Boleslaw Sulik's stunning interpretation of the composer's Polish Requiem (1989) that is built from WWII imagery of death and destruction in Poland. Penderecki's music also appears briefly in Antonio Mercero's La Gioconda está triste (1975), Muratov's war drama Moonzund (1987), Dimitar Petkov's Tishina (1991) abut a young sculptor's scandalous show in 1962, Attila Janisch's Arnyék a havon (Shadow on the Snow, 1991), and Peter Weir's Fearless (1993, along with Jarré, Beethoven, and Gorecki). ~ "Blue" Gene Tyranny, All Movie Guide

The Saragossa Manuscript Buy this Movie

(b D&ecedil;bica, 23 Nov 1933). Polish composer. He was a pupil of Malawski at the Kraków Conservatory (1955-8), where he has also taught. He gained international fame with such works as Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima for 52 strings (1960), exploiting the fierce expressive effects of new sonorities, but in the mid-1970s there came a change to large symphonic forms based on rudimentary chromatic motifs. Central to his work is the St Luke Passion (1965), with its combination of intense expressive force with a severe style with archaic elements alluding to Bach, and its sequel Utrenia, in which Orthodox chant provides musical material and at the same time a sense of mystery. His operas have been admired for their dynamic expression even if their discrete vignettes offer more opportunity for characterization than development.

works:
Operas

• The Devils of Loudun (1969)
• Paradise Lost (1978)
• Die schwarze Maske (1986)
• Ubu Rex (1991)

Choral music

• Psalmy Dawida, perc (1958)
• Strophes, S, reciter, 10 insts (1959)
• Dimensions of Time and Silence, 40vv, inst(s)s (1959)
• Stabat mater (1962)
• Cantata on the 600th anniversary of the Jagellonian University, orch (1964)
• Funeral song for Rutkowski (1964)
• St Luke Passion, narrator, orch (1965)
• Dies irae, orch (1967)
• Kosmogonia, orch (1970)
• Utrenia, orch (1971)
• Canticum canticorum Salomonis, orch (1972)
• Ecloga VIII, 6 male vv (1972)
• Magnificat, B, orch (1974)
• Te Deum, orch (1979)
• Polish Requieum (1980-84)

Orchestral music

• Emanations, 2 str orch (1958)
• Anaklasis, 42 str, perc (1960)
• Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, 52 str (1960)
• Fluorescences (1961)
• Fonogrammi (1961)
• Polymorphia, 48 str (1961)
• Kanon, str, tapes (1962)
• Vn Conc. (1963)
• Sonata, vc, orch (1963)
• Capriccio, ob, 11 str (1965)
• De natura sonoris I (1966), II (1971)
• Capriccio, vn (1967)
• Pittsburgh Ov. (1967)
• Actions, 14 jazz inst(s)s (1971)
• Partita, hpd (1971)
• Praeludium, woodwind, dbns (1971)
• Vc Conc. no.1 (1972)
• Vn Conc. no.2 (1982)
• Sym. no.1 (1973)
• Sym. no.2 (1980)
• The Dream of Jacob (1974)
• Va Conc. (1983)

Chamber music

• 3 str qts (1960, 1968, 1988)

---

Krzysztof Penderecki (born 1933) was the best known of a group of vigorous and adventuresome Polish composers who emerged in the 1950s.

Krzysztof Penderecki was born in Debica, Krakow district, a Polish provincial town, on November 23, 1933 and started his musical studies as a child. During the German occupation of Poland in World War II he experienced some of the Nazi atrocities against Poland's Jewish population. "The problem of that great apocalypse (Auschwitz), that great war crime, has undoubtedly been in my subconscious mind since the war, when as a child, I saw the destruction of the ghetto in my small native town of Debica, " he said.

Penderecki was educated in Krakow where he took courses at the Jagallonian University. He also attended the State Higher School of Music in Krakow from 1955 to 1958. The following year he gained prominence when three compositions he had submitted to a competition organized by the Polish Composer's Union won the first three prizes. These compositions - Strophen for orchestra, Emanations for two string groups, and Psalms of David for a cappella choir - show that he was familiar with the music of Anton Webern, Béla Bartók, and lgor Stravinsky.

Penderecki stayed on at the State Higher School of Music after graduation as a lecturer in composition from 1958 to 1966 and remained from 1972 to 1987, as rector, after it had become the Academy of Music. He was also a professor from 1972 at the Academy of Music.

Penderecki also took the position of visiting teacher at Yale University (from 1972) and at Essen Folkwang Hochschule fur Musik (1966 to 1968) as a professor of composition.

In 1965 he married Elzbieta Solecka and they would later have two children, a son and daughter.

In his Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima (1961) Penderecki achieved a highly original style. Written for 52 strings, it sounds like electronic music. Most of the pages of the score consist of diagrams with symbols he invented to convey his wishes. The opening page, for instance, calls for the strings, divided into 10 groups, to play "the highest note possible." The entrances are staggered, played fortissimo, and held for 15 seconds. The whistling sound is shrill and frightening, like the approach of an airplane. In the course of the piece the players are directed to raise or lower written notes by a quarter or three-quarters of a tone, to play between the bridge and tailpiece, to tap the body of the instrument with fingers and bows, and to play with a wide variety of timbral effects. There are frequent huge clusters of massed half steps and glissandos of such clusters, producing a sound that resembles jet engines warming up. There is no meter. At the bottom of each page there is a wide line with a designation in seconds indicating how long the section should be played. The conductor indicates the beginnings of new time blocks, but there are no beats or subdivisions of them.

Other instrumental pieces by Penderecki that exploit new and expressive instrumental sounds are Anaklasis (1960), Polymorphia (1961), De Natura Sonoris (1966), and Capriccio for violin and orchestra (1968). He also made important contributions to choral literature in works that call for vocal sounds as novel as the sounds he drew from the orchestra. His major choral works are Stabat Mater (1963) for three a cappella choirs, St. Luke Passion (1966), Dies Irae (1967) dedicated to the memory of the victims of Auschwitz, Slavic Mass (1969), Kosmogonia (1970), Ecloga VIII (1972), Magnificat (1974), De Profundis (1977), Te Deum (1979), Lacrimosa (1980), Agnus Dei (1981), and Polnisches Requiem (1984). Other Penderecki works include Praeludium (1971), Partita (1971), Symphony No. 1 (1973), The Dream of Jacob (1974), Symphony No. 2 (1980), Viola Concerto No. 2 (1982), Passacaglia (1988), and the opera The Black Mask (1986).

The Passion follows the baroque pattern and has a narrator and a baritone personifying Christ. The chorus acts both as commentator and participant when it sings the part of the crowd. Penderecki makes great use of a twelve-tone row that consists largely of seconds and thirds, including the familiar B-A-C-H motive (B-flat, A, C, B). Both orchestra and choir use clusters and glissandos, and the choir hisses, shouts, laughs, whispers, and chants. The St. Luke Passion brings together a wide variety of styles; it is a successful amalgamation of tonal resources from the Gregorian chant to the latest experimental sound.

Unlike some of the so-called avant-garde composers, Penderecki did not believe that the fundamental nature of music had changed. He said: "The general principle at the root of a work's musical style, the logic or economy of development, and the integrity of a musical experience embodied in the notes the composer is setting down on paper never changes. The idea of good music means today exactly what it meant always. Music should speak for itself, going straight to the heart and mind of the listener."

Penderecki's works are continually performed throughout the world and he holds teaching or advisory positions at universities around Europe and the world. He is considered by many as one of the most original composers in the world and has been honored with memberships in the Royal Academy of Music in London (1975), the Royal Academy of Music in Stockholm (1975), and the Akademie der Kunste in Germany (1975). He has been honored by nations around the world with the Herder Prize of Germany (1977), the Grand Medal of Paris (1982), the Sibelius Prize of Finland (1983), the Premio Lorenzo il Magnifico of Italy (1985), the Wolf Prize (1987), Academia de Bellas Artes, Granada (1989), and the Das Grosse Verdienstkreuz des Verdienstordens (1990).

In 1997 Penderecki joined many other composers and performers for a birthday concert in honor of Russian composer Mstislav "Slava" Rostopovich at the Theatres des Champs-Elysees in Paris. His work compared favorably to that of other modern composers - like Vladimir Spivakov, Van Cliburn, Semyon Bychkov, and Seiji Ozawa - and was a testament to the originality and power of his music.

Further Reading

There is an extensive biography and listing of Penderecki's works in Brian Morton and Pamela Collins Contemporary Composers (1992). More general information on Penderecki is contained in Stefan Jarocinski Polish Music (1965), Ludwik Erhardt Contemporary Music in Poland (trans. 1966), and Peter S. Hansen An Introduction to Twentieth Century Music (3d ed. 1971). Information on the Rostopovich birthday concert featuring Penderecki can be found in the New York Times (March 29, 1997).

For more information on Krzysztof Penderecki, visit Britannica.com.

Penderecki, Krzysztof (kshĭsh'tôf pändĕrĕts'kē) , 1933–, Polish composer. Penderecki studied at the Superior School of Music in Kraków. His music is characterized by unusual sonorities. He has devised his own system of notation to convey the effects desired. Penderecki's works include the Threnody in Memory of the Victims of Hiroshima (1960), a concerto for five-stringed violin (1967–68), Utrenja [morning prayer] (1970), and the St. Luke Passion (1963–66). From 1972 to 1987 he was rector of the Kraków conservatory.

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)