Krzysztof Penderecki, one of the most significant composers of our time, celebrates his sixtieth birthday this month. Born in Poland, Penderecki expresses a Slavic concern with spirituality and monumentality through a musical language that is startlingly original yet also accessible. He is that rare bird, a serious modern composer who is also popular. A classic in his own time, he is the global voice of "new Poland."

The most striking characteristic of Penderecki's music, apart from its expressive power, is its sheer magnitude. Dominating his output is a gigantic Passion sequence in the mold of Bach's masterworks--a dozen large works composed over a period of twenty years that deal with the problems of violence, suffering, and death. Penderecki's music is intellectually challenging and calls for enlarged orchestras, multiple choruses, and soloists of extraordinary ability. Yet his compositions are as rewarding as they are demanding, and it is a tribute to their effectiveness that despite their physical, logistical, and economic difficulties, they are performed so often.

Penderecki was born on November 23, 1933, in Debica, a moderate-sized city about an hour's drive from Krakow, the cultural capital of ancient Poland. He grew up during the Nazi occupation. His family, consisting mostly of professionals, was spared persecution, but Krzysztof, witnessing the mass arrests of Jews, acquired early on a distaste and resentment of anything that restricted personal liberty. Young Penderecki had an uneventful early school life, but after the war distinguished himself in secondary school as a quick pupil and better-than-average violinist. Upon graduation he headed off to the music schools in Krakow.

For a while, Penderecki studied philosophy and classical Greek and Latin (a wide-ranging intellectual curiosity still drives him), but he soon completed his conservatory studies--in half the usual time. He then entered the Krakow Academy of Music as a composer, setting aside the violin, on which he had become quite proficient, to begin intense studies with Artur Malawski, a Neo-Romantic and one of the country's most important composers. After only two and a half years Malawski died, and Penderecki essentially continued working on his own, developing his own style. He graduated with distinction (his "thesis" was a memorial to his teacher, for strings and timpani) and was immediately offered a teaching post. But at the same time, he entered a nationwide competition, submitting a number of works anonymously. As it turned out, all three top prizes went to his compositions, and Penderecki immediately became one of his country's most talked-about composers--at the age of twenty-six.

That year, 1959, became Penderecki's springboard to worldwide recognition. A trip to Italy--a competition prize--won him international contacts. That same year saw performances of his compositions at the important Warsaw Autumn Festival, in the Polish capital. Composers, critics, and publishers from around the world customarily attend this festival, which showcases the highest quality work from both eastern and western Europe. Tapes of Penderecki's work from the Warsaw Autumn reached the organizers of the prestigious Donaueschingen Music Days, a contemporary music festival established in Germany in the 1920s. Impressed, they commissioned a new work for the following year. Appearing alongside works by Messiaen and Matsudaira, Penderecki's Anaklasis for strings and percussion was an immediate success, and the music world sat up and took note.

Also in 1960 Penderecki completed Threnody (Lamentation) for the Victims of Hiroshima, a tour de force of writing for string orchestra evoking the horrors of nuclear war. It uses numerous unconventional techniques: At times the players strike and beat their instruments with their bows, at others they play wailing quarter-tones between standard pitches. To communicate his intentions, Penderecki even devised his own graphic notation. The result was a soundscape that broke down distinctions between music and noise, one that was perfectly suggested by the title.

Threnody achieved worldwide recognition; although less than nine minutes long, it showed a young composer with an important voice--and also won for new Polish music an esteem it had lacked.

International acclaim for Threnody, and international attention paid to its composer, soon won Penderecki several important commissions that further increased his stature. The most significant came from Munster Cathedral, in what was then West Germany; it was an enormous Passion setting, based on Saint Luke's account of the death of Christ. The musical forces are considerable: a large orchestra, three separate adult choirs, a boys choir, three soloists, and a speaker. The premiere in March 1966 was soon followed by performances around the world. Within a few years, there were more than a hundred, from Minneapolis to Madrid to New York to Tokyo. The St. Luke Passion has become a staple of the new music repertory, winning over audiences and conductors not usually keen on the modern.

In taking on a Passion setting, Penderecki was inevitably inviting criticism--and it came in abundance. Some felt that he was "challenging" Bach; some, that he was trying to please the musical masses. But in fact, the St. Luke Passion is a great synthesis--of early experimentalism with sound/noise, of extended and expanded instrumental techniques, and of an ever-maturing dramatic sensibility. The piece had been preceded by a number of related but shorter works: a Stabat Mater, also for triple choir but unaccompanied, using the text of a medieval poem describing Marys thoughts as she watches the death of Christ; and the Brigade of Death, electronic music for a radio play about the Auschwitz concentration camp. And it was followed by two large-scale works completing the Passion sequence: Utrenja I: The Entombment of Christ (1969-70) and Utrenja II: The Resurrection (1970-71).

Musical-Spiritual Process

It is clear, then, that the composer was working out (facilitated by the commissions that now came his way) a musical-spiritual process of great magnitude, which resonated with the spirit of the times. Vietnam had brought violence and suffering to every home with a television set; the invasion of Czechoslovakia did the same. Woodstock, the Paris student riots, and events around the world made the general public consider the moral issues of war and peace, suffering and hope, in all the arts. Penderecki was perhaps never more a speaker for his age.

In 1972 he was appointed rector at the Krakow Conservatory, but he has also lectured at numerous institutions, including Yale University, and has since received countless awards and honorary degrees. In that same year he began to conduct his own compositions, and then the works of other composers. Largely self-taught as a conductor, he nevertheless is greatly admired for his musical incisiveness and clarity.

The decades following the success of the St. Luke Passion were also highlighted by several opera commissions, the first being The Devils of Loudun, for the Hamburg State Opera (1968-69). Based on a novel by Aldous Huxley, which itself was based on a historical incident, the story centers on a seventeenth-century French priest. Falsely accused of seducing and bewitching a convent of nuns, he is persecuted and burned at the stake (similarities with the persecution of Christ are obvious). Its premiere was not a success, dramatically, but a subsequent performance in Stuttgart rehabilitated it.

Another major work was commissioned by the Chicago Opera for the American Bicentennial: Paradise Lost (1976-78), called a "sacred representation" and based on the epic poem by Milton. It had as its model the biblical dramas performed in Renaissance Florence; these were grand allegories, sung and acted with splendid costumes and scenery. More a series of tableaux than a dramatic narrative, Paradise Lost was the first American premiere of a European opera in half a century (Prokofiev's Love of Three Oranges had premiered in 1921, also in Chicago). The response was not overly positive; many critics felt that an American composer should have been chosen. European critics and audiences, however, have been more favorable.

Alongside these oratorios and operas is a less well known but growing body of orchestral and chamber music. Most important are a number of concerted string works; a Capriccio for violin and orchestra (1967), followed by a full-scale violin concerto (1976-77); and a Capriccio for Cello Solo (1968), followed by a pair of cello concertos (1972 and 1982). There are also two string quartets (1960 and 1968-70).

The last decade or so has seen Penderecki increasingly in demand as a conductor of his works. He travels widely, usually with his wife, Elzbieta, and only occasionally has a month of continuous residence in Poland. He has composed fewer large-scaled pieces, one notable exception being the Polish Requiem (1980-84), completed after martial law was imposed in Poland in an effort to reverse the democratic successes of the Solidarity movement. The requiem began with three previously composed sections: "Lacrimosa," written in 1980 to honor Solidarity workers killed during the uprising; "Agnus Dei," composed in 1981 for the funeral of the composer's friend, Cardinal Wyszynski, the Catholic primate of Poland; and "Recordare, Jesu Pie," written for ceremonies honoring Father Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish priest in Auschwitz who had volunteered to die in place of another prisoner who was the father of a family. To these sections Penderecki then added most of the other movements of the Catholic funeral mass, conducting the premiere in Stuttgart in September 1984. It is a work of national mourning, and woven into the musical texture is a medieval Polish hymn, "Swiety Boze" (Great God, have mercy on us). The evening after the premiere, Penderecki commented,

You can't live without hope. And that you can interpret religiously, or as it relates to an inner world; music never speaks directly. I believe that for Poland too the day for a new life will dawn, one day.

The last few years have seen the completion of two additional operas--The Black Mask (1984-86), on a play by Gerhart Hauptmann, set in seventeenth-century Silesia and exploding with conflicting religions, the Inquisition, and the Plague; and Ubu roi (1990), based on the biting, socially satirical play by Alfred Jarry. An increasingly hectic conducting schedule has limited Penderecki's free time available for composing. This year alone, he has seventy-five engagements all around the world. But he has several works near completion, including his Fifth Symphony (to be premiered by the Pittsburgh Symphony before the end of the year), his Second Violin Concerto (for Anne-Sophie Mutter, the German virtuoso featured in the April 1989 issue of THE WORLD & I), and a flute concerto (for his good friend Jean-Pierre Rampal).

Wide Appeal

Pendenecki's achievement has been to create, almost from the start of his career, music with a wide and even popular appeal, despite its unconventional timbres and avoidance of traditional tonality. His appetite for unusual sound-colors was formed by early experience in an electronic-music studio, creating music for films, plays, and puppet shows.

"Electronics changed my attitude toward music very much," he told this writer in a recent interview. "In the late fifties, we were isolated, forbidden to travel--although I dreamed of going to the modem music festival at Darmstadt. I was forced to develop something out of myself, and began to work in a studio in Warsaw. Then later, I made what was in some ways a transcription, from the sounds of the studio to normal instruments."

In the fifties and sixties, influenced by his electronic work, Penderecki began to experiment. "I was trying to find a new musical language--in pieces like Threnody and the First String Quartet--trying to forget everything that I had learned. I had a strongly traditional education, writing fugues, five-voice counterpoint, things like that. For three years, my first teacher had me write in a different style every week: a piano piece in the style of Brahms, next week Debussy, Beethoven, Honegger, Chopin, and so on. I never really wrote my own music; but I think it was a good idea, because I learned to concentrate on structure and form--and also to write very quickly. And although these were meant as exercises, some were good enough to print eventually. I just finished editing a violin-piano sonata I wrote when I was twenty, sort of in the style of Shostakovich.

"After conservatory, I wanted to experiment. The sixties were my turning point; it was then that I wrote Threnody, in 1960, and the Stabat Mater two years later. Utrenja is a combination of pure, a capella vocal writing and orchestral effects (for strings and percussion) very much connected with electronic music."

Many critics see the beginnings of a new phase in the mid-sixties, an interest in more traditional drama and ritual. Penderecki explained it this way: "I have always had this kind of dualism; one side, searching for something which didn't exist before me, and another side rediscovering, for example, Romantic music. Sometimes I have kind of an affair with Romantic music. Some people find pieces like this--my First Violin Concerto of 1976, the Second Symphony three years later--easier to listen to. Some call it Romantic music. I can only say that I move in this zigzag way."

Over the years, Penderecki has moved from the experimental, graphic scores and sound effects of works like Threnody to more conventional notation. The great vocal works (St. Luke Passion, the two parts of Utrenja, and The Devils of Loudun) were paralleled by instrumental pieces that reveled in unusual timbres, especially for percussion. There were two instrumental "essays," De natura sonoris I and II (On the nature of sound I and II, 1966 and 1971), taking as a starting point a quote from the Roman philosopher Lucretius. These explore, among other effects, the extreme ranges of instruments (a characteristic of jazz playing that much fascinated Penderecki and which resulted in Actions, for jazz orchestra, in 1971).

By the time of the First Violin Concerto, written for Isaac Stern in 1976, there was a melodiousness of a softer nature, which critics, as noted earlier, heard as a "new Romanticism." But the appeal that this concerto enjoys, as well as the other string concertos (especially the Second Cello Concerto of 1982, for Rostropovich, and the little solo "Per Slava" three years later), is undeniable and continues to expand Penderecki's audience.

"My music has always been music of opposition," Penderecki told me. "When we were growing up, they wanted us to write in the then-modern Russian style, and even to use folk songs for political reasons. I was allergic to that, I'm afraid. Later, I wrote religious music--partly because it was not welcome. I don't think of myself as a political composer, though I was of course personally involved in the turbulence of the seventies and eighties in Poland. The Polish Requiem was my response; I don't think I could write that kind of piece now."

This year celebrations of Penderecki's birthday are taking place all around the world. In Poland itself all four of his operas will be staged in Warsaw. There are also major festivals in Stockholm and Vienna this month.

There will be individual works in concerts, of course, and many chances to hear Penderecki's music live. A number of CDs are scheduled for release as well, and for those not familiar with his music the great choral works may be the best place to begin. Two recordings are especially recommended, both conducted by the composer: the St. Luke Passion (Argo 430 328-2) and Polish Requiem (on Deutsche Grammophon, DGG 429 720-2). Both are fine introductions to one of the most vibrant, complex, and significant composers of our time, as he continues a fascinating journey in music.