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Illustrations
- Andrzej Panufnik
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- Book:
- Composing Myself
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- Boydell & Brewer
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- 09 January 2024
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- 28 March 2023, pp 6-10
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26 - Accelerando
- Andrzej Panufnik
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- Book:
- Composing Myself
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- Boydell & Brewer
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- 09 January 2024
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- 28 March 2023, pp 387-404
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Summary
The 1980s began auspiciously with a telephone call across the Atlantic from the Boston Symphony Orchestra, requesting that I should compose a work for its Centennial celebrations. Unable to imagine any greater stimulus than to compose for this magnificent American orchestra, I immediately agreed.
Before I could start, I had already on my plate some interesting commitments. Accepting a new commission is always a euphoric experience and I spend happy moments after signing an agreement dreaming of how I can make the most of each particular opportunity. However, I always resist the temptation of tackling the fresh project until any current undertaking is safely completed. I do not like to involve myself with several compositions at once.
So for a long time the promised piece remains a pleasurable future challenge. Then suddenly an alarming moment arrives, when I come face to face with blank manuscript paper, often with a deadline roaring towards me.
That early stage in the creation of a new work is for me the hardest. Everything has to be imagined and worked out in my head before a single note is put on to paper. Here my geometry is a great help, providing as it can an unseen framework around which I can organise my notes, my thoughts and feelings. Sometimes an idea comes at once; sometimes this chrysalis stage takes weeks, even months. I just think and plan, keeping to my daily discipline, going to my studio from nine in the morning till seven in the evening, either sitting silently, or experimenting with new harmonies and new sound combinations at the piano. Most days I continue my efforts as I go for walks along the River Thames, my mind totally abstracted in my search for a new musical architecture and climate, which I try to make different for each successive work. At these times, I am so absorbed in my patterns of emerging sound that, apparently, I stride straight past and stare right through my Twickenham friends and neighbours, who by now understand and do not take offence.
Once the structure of a new work is clear to me – once I know where I am going – I roughly sketch the whole outline in pencil and the first important stage of creative work is over.
5 - Studying with Weingartner: Vienna
- Andrzej Panufnik
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- Book:
- Composing Myself
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- Boydell & Brewer
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- 09 January 2024
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- 28 March 2023, pp 96-109
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Summary
Presenting myself at the State Academy next morning, I was startled to discover that the Registrar had heard nothing from Weingartner about my arrival. I asked anyway to register my name and complete any necessary formalities. To my amazement, I was told that I would have to undergo an entrance examination on musical theory and keyboard skills in two weeks’ time. In vain I explained about my diploma with distinction, my experience conducting Beethoven and Brahms with the Conservatoire Orchestra, and conducting my own Symphonic Variations with the Warsaw Philharmonic. The Registrar did not seem particularly impressed. He said that about a hundred applicants would be competing for very few places, and that no exceptions could be made.
Suddenly I felt alarmed, imagining failure, an ignominious return to Poland, my grant cancelled, my future in ruins. I pulled myself together, put my name down for the exam, and, while walking back to my hotel, started to plan how to prepare myself. I would find a room where I could live and practise, and would take daily lessons in German so that I would be more fluent in answering questions. I plunged into action at once, finding a beautiful room with a piano in a large flat in central Vienna, the home of a prosperous shopkeeper. The attractive daughter of the house, plump, blonde and blue-eyed, seemed only too willing to give me some lessons in German and perhaps something more, to judge from her provocative manner – though at that time I was so obsessed with my work for the impending exam that I was living a monk-like existence.
On examination day I found myself in a crowded room, my heart thumping furiously. I watched a Japanese student, his face greenish grey-white, walk trembling into the examination room. My turn was next. Standing by the door, I tried to hear as much as possible of the procedure.
First the jury asked him to play the piano. I heard him attack Bach's Prelude and Fugue in C major. After ten to fifteen seconds, he came to a stop. He tried to carry on from where he had stumbled, but could not, so he began again, breaking down at exactly the same place as before. Two more disastrous attempts were followed by a long silence.
Frontmatter
- Andrzej Panufnik
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- Book:
- Composing Myself
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- Boydell & Brewer
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- 09 January 2024
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- 28 March 2023, pp 1-4
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17 - Public and Private Dramas
- Andrzej Panufnik
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- Composing Myself
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- 09 January 2024
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- 28 March 2023, pp 232-251
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Summary
The authorities now assumed a stick-and-carrot technique in dealing with me. While declaring my symphony extinct, they awarded me the highest honour in the land, the Standard of Labour First Class!
This carrot was worth more than the gilded and red-ribboned medal that came with it. It entitled me to the special facilities enjoyed by our top politicians and Party members, including improved medical care and the right to obtain foreign medicine, otherwise unavailable.
I decided to try to re-apply for an apartment. My father, always longing to return to Warsaw, urgently needed to be rescued from the unlovable cousins. The Kraków flat was my only proper home, though I stayed most of the time in the Union house in order to carry out my Warsaw duties. With the political pressures, composition was receding out of my life yet again; my creative imagination had gone numb. I wondered whether, with reasonable privacy and quiet working conditions, I might still, without betraying my aesthetic principles, find some musical solution even within the constrictions of Socialist Realism. Part of me had become cynical about having to eat and breathe the system, but another part remained patriotic, needing – indeed, wanting profoundly – to remain a Polish composer able to function creatively in my own environment.
Only a matter of weeks after my application to the Housing Minister, I was informed that a two-room flat was at my disposal, by chance in a district of Mokotów, on land which had formerly belonged to my great-grandfather Szuster. My father was overjoyed. In a hired lorry, I transported him with his violins and the little furniture we possessed to Warsaw. Climbing to the first floor of the small, modern block, I took the key from my pocket and opened the front door, drawing back to watch the happiness in his face at the sight of his new home; but his features crumpled in anger and disgust.
‘Do you call that a flat?’ he asked me reproachfully. ‘It's a doll's house!’ He was quite unable to appreciate the miracle that we had anything at all: two small, bare, square rooms, a kitchen one could hardly turn round in and a bathroom like a cupboard. Soon, however,
22 - Autumn Music
- Andrzej Panufnik
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- Composing Myself
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- 09 January 2024
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- 28 March 2023, pp 313-328
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Summary
Not long after my return to London, I was moved to learn that the loyal and caring Stephen Lloyd had arranged that I should receive the Feeney Trust Commission for the following year, and it was agreed that I could use it to complete the Piano Concerto for which I had made sketches three years previously.
Before I could return fully to composition, I had to fulfil one more conducting date at the Proms. With the BBC Symphony Orchestra, I again shared an evening with Sir Malcolm Sargent, finishing the concert with my Polonia.
It was loudly acclaimed, and I was called back to the platform several times, little knowing that it was to be my last appearance at the Promenade concerts for many, many years to come. Though my Polonia pleased the orchestra and the public, it evidently did not please the new Music Controller at the BBC1 – for when I asked to hear the tape afterwards I was told that it had been destroyed.
I still had not fully realised the significance of the retirement of Richard Howgill, nor the full implications for my future of the new regime at the BBC. Longing to fly freely as a composer, I had leapt from the financial security and respected position of Musical Director in Birmingham without noticing that a new fashion was about to grip all the modern music outlets, not only in Britain but throughout the western world, and that, as an independent Pole with an independent compositional style and a considerable obstinacy about allowing anyone to dictate to him, I would, once more, have to write with little hope of performance for a matter of many years before at last my musical voice could again be allowed to filter through.
Meanwhile, I was feeling unusually optimistic about my private as well as my professional life. In the early autumn of 1959, I was introduced to Winsome Ward, a most attractive woman of my own age, with a pale, delicate complexion and light reddish-brown hair. She was a specially English type: as a girl she must have been the ultimate ‘English rose’.
1 - Panufnik’s Preface
- Andrzej Panufnik
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- Book:
- Composing Myself
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- Boydell & Brewer
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- 09 January 2024
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- 28 March 2023, pp 23-49
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Summary
At the beginning of this century there lived in Warsaw a young man, an engineer by profession, who earned his living as a specialist in hydro-technology, but whose real passion was the construction of violins.
His days were passed in a city office, where he concerned himself with the sinking of wells and the drainage of marshes; but his long and sleepless nights were spent in obsessive efforts to unravel the secrets of the seventeenth-century Italian masters in the craft of violin-making. The studio where he lived and worked was filled with all manner of oddly shaped metal implements and curious small curved saws, as well as sketches, mathematical diagrams, chemical formulae, pieces of carefully chosen mature wood, instruments in various stages of construction and, in due course, some beautiful finished violins of his own design.
He was a lean, rather aristocratic-looking man of medium height with chestnut hair and a trim moustache, his small grey eyes, somewhat short-sighted, often half-hidden behind a pair of pince-nez. He dressed smartly, with infinite care over the neatness of his appearance, and was thought to be handsome. Yet he avoided social life, never making any contact with his neighbours. As they passed his door, mystified by the strange smells of lacquer and glue, hearing the sound of the saw, seeing his lights burning all night, they cast increasingly suspicious glances in his direction – concluding, maybe, that he was involved in some sort of mediaeval alchemy.
One morning he was surprised by a visit from an elegant middle-aged woman, who had been given his address by a famous Warsaw teacher of the violin, Professor Isidor Lotto. She had heard that he constructed excellent violins and wondered if he would consider letting her purchase one for her daughter.
The young man was flattered to discover that his instruments were becoming known; but at the same time he was almost hurt that anyone should imagine that his interest was commercial. He answered that he was not a salesman, that he was engaged in serious scientific research, and that he constructed his models for that purpose alone.
19 - Escape
- Andrzej Panufnik
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- Book:
- Composing Myself
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- Boydell & Brewer
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- 09 January 2024
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- 28 March 2023, pp 270-281
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Summary
‘I must leave Poland!’
Scarlett stared at me in disbelief and alarm. She did not at first take me seriously.
After a night without one blink of sleep, I reaffirmed my intention; a further 24 hours passed and my resolution had become even more firmly fixed, despite my awareness of gargantuan obstacles ahead. My escape from Poland would be extremely perilous; but this was not the only danger I was facing. I had no idea if I would be able to build a career elsewhere: I might neither be accepted into the musical life of any other country, nor, tearing my roots from my native soil, find myself able to develop further as a composer. But I could not compose at home either. I felt not one ounce of hesitation about throwing away my exalted but empty position in Poland in exchange for the unknown. The succession of final straws had beaten me into a state of absolute determination to leap into any void rather than submit to the absurd pressures for an instant longer. And, as I went, I planned to make enough clatter to ensure that the whole world would hear about the hell experienced by creative artists in the countries of the Eastern bloc.
Poor Scarlett had not the slightest desire to leave. Companionship counted much more for her than politics or even music. She seemed to feel that she belonged now more to Poland than to her native Ireland.1 She had made many friends in Warsaw – and they were now perhaps her only friends after eight years away from home. She thrived on the waves of adulation emanating from the gallant Poles, who know better than anyone else in the world how to show admiration for attractive women. In Warsaw her pale skin and glinting auburn hair were exotic, almost unique. It was asking a lot to expect her to give up her reign as a great beauty as well as her privileged social standing in Poland as my wife. However, if she were to remain in Warsaw, it could only be without me.
She gradually understood as I told her that my nerves would crack totally if I stayed on; that I was on the point of mental breakdown; that I had to burst out of our prison, whatever dangers lay outside, because otherwise inside I would suffocate, explode.
16 - The Rise and Fall of Sinfonia Rustica
- Andrzej Panufnik
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- Book:
- Composing Myself
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- Boydell & Brewer
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- 09 January 2024
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- 28 March 2023, pp 206-231
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Summary
For a brief interlude, I found time again for composition. The moment had arrived, I felt, to galvanise myself into tackling a new symphony, of completely different character from the previous ones. Sentiment prevented me from re-using the appellations of my lost Symphonies Nos. 1 and 2. I decided to give my new work – and any future symphonies – names instead of numbers.
My Sinfonia Rustica emerged as an expression of my love for the Polish peasant music from the northern part of our country, where the songs have exceptional charm. The art of the region is also outstanding, with imaginatively carved woodwork, brilliant folk costumes and intricate, colourful paper-cuts, either abstract or semi-abstract, often of symmetrical design. I decided that I would reflect these naïve but aesthetically appealing features in my new symphony. The symmetry of the paper-cuts was to enter into all aspects of the composition. Even the orchestral layout was symmetrical, for acoustic reasons as well as for visual effect, with eight wind instruments in the middle of the concert platform and two small string orchestras on either side carrying on a dialogue.
But I was not left in peace to complete this work. Together with several of my fellow composers, I was chosen by the Minister of Culture to join the governing body of the new Composers’ Union. Before I had even a chance to hesitate, I was harangued by a Ministry official to the effect that it would be to my advantage to abandon my ‘ivory tower’ (a critical label frequently applied to creative artists in the Soviet Union). In view of all that I had been trying to do for Polish music in general, while others – for understandable reasons – had remained at home composing, it did not seem a fair criticism. Moreover, the pressure was unnecessary, because I genuinely wanted to work for the newly created Composers’ Union. I realised that with a well-organised Union we should be able to obtain financial subsidies to commission new works, and we could actively encourage conductors and instrumentalists to perform new Polish music. We would also be able to demand that our members receive proper royalties, and stand up for their rights over such vital matters as housing and medical facilities, which otherwise were unattainable.
Preface
- Andrzej Panufnik
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- Book:
- Composing Myself
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- Boydell & Brewer
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- 09 January 2024
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- 28 March 2023, pp 11-14
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Summary
One's education – one's real education – comes to one much more frequently in the byways than in the highways. In my late teens I discovered so much that has mattered to me musically in a little shop which rejoiced in the defiantly arch name of Orchesography in Cecil Court, off the Charing Cross Road in the West End of London. It sold rarefied remaindered LP records at knock-down prices and was run by a laconic but arcanely knowledgeable New Zealander called John who thoughtfully pushed his latest discoveries my way. He was very smart: I was never disappointed by the stuff he laid on for me. ‘Got something for you’, he’d say, when I came into the shop, or ‘Might like this’. On one such day the thing he thought I might like had a very striking sleeve, a stylised landscape in shades of milky brown; the name of the composer, quite unknown to me, was unpronounceable. Even John didn't attempt it. Andrzej Panufnik, the cover said. ‘Tonal?’ I asked, warily. ‘Oh, yes.’ ‘Weird?’ ‘No.’ It was called Sinfonia Sacra. ‘Catholic?’ ‘Probably. Polish, anyway.’ He played a track. Answering festive fanfares, out of which, completely unexpectedly, hushed strings emerged like a blessing. It was oddly compelling. I was caught: I had to know what the story of this music was. I put it like that because there was something about the music that had a powerful narrative drive. This man was telling me something about his life: it bespoke deep experience.
When I got home and listened further, my fascination and astonishment grew. This was like no music I had ever heard. The organisation of the piece was initially bewildering: three Visions and a Hymn? The two subsequent Visions – a spell-bound Larghetto and then what was in effect a percussion concerto – were followed by a sustained and increasingly ecstatic final slow movement which had the intensity and rapture of the equivalent movement in Mahler's Third Symphony but bore no resemblance whatever to Mahler, any more than any of the other movements resembled the music of any other composer. And yet it all hung together. More than that: it had a taut coherence about it that defied analysis. There was something inevitable about the piece: the story it told had an urgency that demanded attention.
14 - Back to Composition
- Andrzej Panufnik
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- Book:
- Composing Myself
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- Boydell & Brewer
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- 09 January 2024
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- 28 March 2023, pp 194-199
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Summary
My mind now lit on the Polish proverb, ‘Nothing is so bad that it cannot be turned to good!’ Suddenly, fate had arranged that I would again have time to compose.
Not counting my film scores, my last new composition had been my Tragic Overture in 1942. With a five-year break in my serious creative work, how was I going to find the resources within me to start again?
While abroad I had become conscious of the growing fashion in Europe to compose dodecaphonically. This seemed to me too easy a way out; the straight exchange of one convention for another. I had not abandoned my ambition to seek out my own language, my own voice, if only I could achieve it.
Meanwhile, theories apart, I had to know if I could still compose at all. I began tentatively to improvise on the piano, exploring harmonic, melodic and rhythmic ideas, gradually making additional searches to extend some purely pianistic possibilities. Even three years after my daily wartime performances, my fingers were still in good running order, and I was able to juggle with technique without difficulty. Before long, to my great relief, musical ideas, orchestral as well as pianistic, began to surge into my imagination.
I decided to stay for the moment with the piano and to compose a cycle of twelve studies. Each piece would strongly contrast with the previous one in terms of tempo and dynamic – but, to achieve unity, all were based on the same melodic line, rising and falling like a double wave, with a different key for each study. The first was in C sharp, (major-minor), the next in F sharp, a fifth lower; the next in B, again a fifth lower, continuing in this manner, descending a fifth each time. After twelve such descents, the circle was completed and I arrived back at C sharp, having used every key in the scale. For this reason I named the work Circle of Fifths (later it was published as Twelve Miniature Studies).
With my Circle of Fifths safely written, and my faith in myself as a composer re-emerging, I now felt ready to tackle something more substantial, though my work conditions were not perfect. I still had to travel more than I had imagined, to Łódź to carry out my duties for the Film Unit and to Warsaw for various outstanding commitments.
24 - New Home, New Family, New Music
- Andrzej Panufnik
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- Book:
- Composing Myself
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- Boydell & Brewer
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- 09 January 2024
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- 28 March 2023, pp 340-359
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Summary
Our honeymoon was hasty, not for lack of romance, but because we were both longing to start our new life in our new home. It mattered not a jot to us that we would be camping for months in a tiny, damp cottage in the grounds, while Camilla struggled with roof-repairers, builders and acres of sticky wallpaper.
Her first priority was the conversion of the old stable and carriage house at the end of the garden into a warm, pine-panelled studio for my use. Meanwhile, as I had an urgent commission for a choral piece, I was able to work just along the river in St Mary’s, a beautiful small eighteenth-century parish church with an eleventh-century tower, the burial place of the great poet, Alexander Pope. (Our corner of Twickenham was potent with its history of interesting inhabitants.)
Though only twenty minutes by car from central London, our surroundings were almost rural, with trees and greenery running down to the River Thames. When the moon was full and the tides high, the river would rise above its borders and fill the little lane past our house, surging up our drive, often preventing us from leaving. (Sometimes it made us embarrassingly late for crucial appointments; we could only give the unlikely-sounding excuse that we had been cut off by the tide in Twickenham.) Gratifying my lifelong passion for trees, I now had as my companions in my own garden towering ancient chestnuts, a gigantic plane, and, on our river frontage, three whispering willows, which acknowledged the coming of spring before any other plant: in early March they turned golden, soon to become daubed, like an Impressionist painting, with tiny specks of exquisite pale green as the myriad leaves budded along the delicate wind-swung umbrella-like branches.
Every day I would walk a mile or so along the towpath to Richmond with our yellow Labrador puppy, past Orleans House, the home of Louis- Philippe of France when in exile, with its extraordinary Gibbs Octagon Room; past the magnificent Palladian Marble Hill House, the residence of King George II's mistress, the Countess of Suffolk, stopping often to admire an ancient rare black walnut tree, planted in her grounds in the early eighteenth century; past ducks, swans, more willows, more boats, following the river's curve to Richmond Bridge, and, if I cared to walk further, to Kew Gardens.
Editorial Introduction
- Andrzej Panufnik
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- Book:
- Composing Myself
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- Boydell & Brewer
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- 09 January 2024
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- 28 March 2023, pp 15-18
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Summary
Andrzej Panufnik occasionally protested that he was not a man of words and that his principal means of expression was music. Indeed, his relationship with words was a difficult one, conditioned by his experience in post-war Poland of how they could be misused. The resulting distrust of the microphone and of journalists was something he never lost, even after decades of living in the west. But his published output of words – which consists of the autobiography Composing Myself,1 the series of programme notes he wrote on his compositions (many of them assembled as Impulse and Design in my Music2), a number of articles in newspapers and periodicals and the thoughts he voiced in interview – is an important one.
A Polish translation of Composing Myself was published by Marginesy in Warsaw to mark Panufnik's centenary in 2014, by when the original English edition had long since become a collector's item. The idea of producing a new edition of Composing Myself – supplemented by a chapter by Camilla, Lady Panufnik, to bring the story up to date with an account of Panufnik's life after the writing of Composing Myself and a survey of the events marking the centenary – then grew to include those programme notes, articles and interviews. The initial intention was to publish them all inside a single set of covers, but the late discovery of a further cache of articles and interviews in the Panufnik archive threw that plan into disarray: it would have meant further delay, and resulted in a book of unwieldy proportions. Panufnik's obiter scripta and dicta will therefore follow in a second volume.
The principal component of this anthology, its Volume One, is Composing Myself, which Panufnik described in an interview with Robert Maycock as ‘just facts, events, in a straightforward way’; nonetheless, he admitted that ‘I didn't much like doing that’ – and Maycock adds that ‘it took heavy persuasion by friends to get it out of him’.
Even if one ignores for a moment the window it opens onto the inner life of a major composer, it is itself a valuable historical document, with its first-hand account of musical and material life in Poland both between the World Wars and after the Nazi invasion in September 1939, and its charting of Panufnik's difficult position as an internal dissident who was also a showcase cultural figure for the Communist regime.
7 - Outbreak of War:Warsaw
- Andrzej Panufnik
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- Book:
- Composing Myself
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- Boydell & Brewer
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- 09 January 2024
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- 28 March 2023, pp 122-135
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In France and England, I had noticed, despite the curious apathy, at least a vague awareness of the dangers of the deteriorating situation in central Europe. Back in Poland, I found my countrymen completely out of touch with reality.
A few days after my return to Warsaw, I met an old school-friend and our conversation soon turned to politics. I told him gloomily of the scenes I had witnessed in Austria the previous year, voicing my dread that Hitler's expansionist aims could lead to tragedy and annihilation.
‘Hitler?’, my friend said, and burst into laughter, as though I had told him a good joke. ‘You have just come back from abroad, so you don't know what we think in Poland.’ His tone became suddenly harsh and aggressive: ‘Hitler?’, he repeated. ‘We all shit on him with loose bowels!’ (a charming expression he had coined from Marshal Piłsudski).
He plainly expected to shock me. I replied quietly, ‘Of course, but don't you realise that he's capable of invading us. He's power mad! And the German army is said to be extremely well organised, disciplined, very strong…’.
I was interrupted, ‘The German army? They don't know how to fight!’ It was a firm declaration of faith, based on the widely held belief that only Poles had military prowess.
‘But they have incredibly tough, lethal tanks,’ I argued. ‘I saw them in Vienna. What is more, they can produce them with great speed, in great numbers.’
‘German tanks?’ My friend laughed with total assurance. ‘They are made of paper. Everybody knows that. If they dare to attack us, our boys from the cavalry will finish them off in a flash!’
His naïve views on the invincibility of Poland were shared by practically everybody I met. For the time being I had to keep quiet about my fears. But as the situation in Europe worsened, the government gradually began to admit to the general public the possibility of military conflict in the not-too-distant future. These hints soon turned to positive defiance. An optimistic slogan, borrowed from Marshal Rydz-Śmigły, the Minister of Defence, was trumpeted forth by press and radio so many times a day that eventually it became sickening: ‘Incursion by force will be repelled by force!’
8 - Occupation
- Andrzej Panufnik
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- Book:
- Composing Myself
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- Boydell & Brewer
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- 09 January 2024
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- 28 March 2023, pp 136-151
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Over the next few months, Warsaw slowly resumed a semblance of life. Shops selling necessities gradually reopened. A few cafés and restaurants were also permitted to trade, some of them newly built; they displayed a brave façade of elegance, with society ladies working as cooks and cashiers; the waitresses were beautiful girls, also often from aristocratic families.
The city's transport system had changed its appearance drastically. Without petrol, cars and taxis had disappeared. But the red electric trams started to trundle again through the streets, the front seats reserved for the Germans. The tram conductors would pocket our money, usually without issuing tickets, intending later to share out their profits with the driver and controllers; cheating the occupying forces was a patriotic duty, so we did not demur. Away from the tram routes, it was sometimes possible to find a dorożki, a shabby old carriage drawn by a painfully undernourished horse. The only other form of taxi was a home-made rickety rickshaw. Desperate for some sort of a living, people had converted old bikes into tricycles; the passengers were hunched uncomfortably in a cramped double seat over two front wheels. The driver provided pedal-power from behind. Only once, when late for an appointment, did I ride in a rickshaw. It was distressing to hear the driver gasping for breath behind my neck. I felt sure that he must be damaging his health, so I gave him the full fare we had agreed, but finished the journey with my own foot-power.
The ways that people earned their living in Warsaw at this time often bore no relation to the profession for which they had originally trained. Highly qualified engineers, doctors, artists, schoolteachers and university lecturers became door-to-door salesmen, touting sausages, tobacco, underwear, or anything else they could find to sell for a modest profit.
Professional musicians of high calibre were to be heard playing in the streets for a pittance. Sometimes they gathered together in ensemble. Once I heard a whole orchestra, so excellent that I stopped to investigate. The conductor was none other than my teacher from the Warsaw Conservatoire, Professor Major Śledziński, who had shown me kindness and understanding when I was struggling in the grips of National Service.
2 - No More Piano Lessons
- Andrzej Panufnik
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- Book:
- Composing Myself
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- Boydell & Brewer
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- 09 January 2024
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- 28 March 2023, pp 50-62
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At home only one person was pleased about my disaster: my father. Now he could feel confident that music was not my destiny. He made use of my distress to reinforce his determination that I should have no more piano lessons and that my general education should come first. My shock at the examination result, together with his attitude, almost succeeded in making me give up music altogether. Still only twelve years old, I turned back almost frenetically to my old hobby of making model aeroplanes, not touching the piano for many a month, feeling that it was no longer a friend, almost as if it were a living creature that had let me down.
In the following four years, my life was devoid of music. This misery was compounded by my father's constant financial troubles, which caused me to change schools twice.
In the years 1925 and 1926, my father was unable to find work in his profession as an engineer. His violins had won him great prestige; even the world-famous violinist, Bronisław Huberman, visited our home and arranged some ‘blind’ trials, in which my father's instruments won higher praise than any others, even higher than the old Italian instruments, including a Stradivarius. But the violins reaped admiration only – no financial rewards to save us from disaster. Rich people interested in investment bought old instruments, especially those which bore the names of great Italian makers, while professional musicians who dreamt of buying one of my father's instruments could not afford them.
Worse still, my father, through his gullibility and kindness, was plunged by a confidence trickster into the most appalling debts. He was suddenly befriended by a Polish army officer, who professed a flattering interest in his violins, asking searching and interesting questions, so that my father greatly enjoyed his visits. I often saw this Colonel Weintraub, standing in front of the large, glass-fronted shelves in which my father kept his instruments. He was a small, fat man with an expansive stomach that hung over the belt of his uniform. He was mostly bald, and what hair remained was shaved to the skin.
Panufnik’s Preface
- Andrzej Panufnik
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- Book:
- Composing Myself
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 09 January 2024
- Print publication:
- 28 March 2023, pp 21-22
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Summary
Unlike my great compatriot Joseph Conrad, I never felt any inclination towards literary activity, and my English, even after living more than thirty years in Britain, is still rather precarious. However, I was strongly persuaded (even bullied) by friends to write this autobiography. Through their questions, I found myself provoked to go back (a somewhat painful experience) over the chain of dramatic incidents which provided a stormy background to the peace of which I had always dreamt as a composer. I am grateful to these friends for their kindly curiosity, for sparking me off and giving me the impetus to carry through my task, spurring me on to write details about my personal life and my creative work, which, without their insistence, I would probably have kept to myself for ever.
My thanks go especially to our family friend, Jenny Pearson, who used to bicycle twice a week from Kew to Twickenham in order to work with me on the newly scrawled pages of my unpolished (all-too-Polished!) English. Through her unbelievable patience, determination and the magic she performed on my grammar and spelling, as well as her splendid typing, my scribble became a manuscript. My warm thanks also to others who have given me practical advice and help: David Drew, Antony Hopkins, Bernard Jacobson, Janis Susskind and my editor Christopher Falkus. Above all, of course, my deepest gratitude goes to my wife, Camilla. Without her tireless assistance, and her gentle encouragement, I would never have kept away from my composition long enough to complete this book.
20 - From Number One to No One
- Andrzej Panufnik
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- Book:
- Composing Myself
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 09 January 2024
- Print publication:
- 28 March 2023, pp 282-302
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I arrived at Heathrow airport on 14 July 1954. Waiting for me was Scarlett in the company of two representatives of the British Foreign Office Special Branch, ready to receive my instant request for political asylum. They took us to a hiding place up-river on the Thames, the unpretentious home of a charming middle-aged couple who treated us more like prodigal children than official guests. As the Foreign Office already knew all about me from Scarlett, and probably from undercover enquiries through their contacts in Poland, I was never interrogated, only treated with the utmost courtesy, kindness and discretion.
My escape was reported dramatically in the newspapers of the free world. A press conference, for which I briefly left my country retreat, allowed me to give my precise reasons for leaving my native country as well as the opportunity I had longed for to speak out about Poland's enslavement by Soviet Russia, about the misery of our people and the frustration of intellectuals, scientists, writers and all creative artists. I prepared a full statement, which was printed and broadcast all over the free world, ending with the words, ‘I hope very much that my protest will help my fellow composers still living in Poland with their struggle towards liberation from the rigid political control imposed upon them …’.
The Government of People's Poland, already furious over my escape, was clearly even angrier about my statement. I was condemned in the Polish press as a ‘traitor to the Polish nation’. In addition to a bitter charge that I was ‘running away from the task of creating a new style in Polish music’ and ‘avoiding the duties of creative patriotism’, I was subjected to the customary methods of character-assassination. I was said to have ‘stolen’ the small sum of money handed to me on arrival in Zurich, which I had quite legally used to pay for my meals while still recording and promoting Polish music. My ‘cynical desertion’ of my native land they said was for financial gain – and added that I had illegally smuggled out of Poland musical instruments inherited from my father.
11 - ‘Liberated’ by the Soviets
- Andrzej Panufnik
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- Book:
- Composing Myself
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
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- 09 January 2024
- Print publication:
- 28 March 2023, pp 167-172
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A few weeks after my adventure with the violins, the Soviet Army found themselves ready to move in and ‘liberate’ the ruins of Warsaw.
The thunder of heavy artillery grew more distinct each day, so that I feared that even our quiet suburb might become a battlefield. How was I going to save my frail old parents, my little niece (and, of course, my father's violins)? Casting around for ways of escape, I was able to bribe a Polish railwayman to smuggle us into an empty wagon on a freight train to Zakopane in the Tatra Mountains. The journey lasted six days in the freezing cold of December. Most of the time we were locked into our draughty wagon in railway sidings, with no knowledge of when or if we would move again, with almost no food or drinking water, nor any kind of lavatory.
Somehow we tumbled out alive in Zakopane, and were lucky enough to find a villa to rent immediately. It was far harder to track down fuel or food. I trod through the snow for hours, driven on by the image of little Ewa in our new home crying with hunger.
I learnt that bread was available only if I were to join a huge queue at five in the morning waiting for the baker to open at nine. Even after hours in the darkness and snow, I could not be sure of obtaining a tiny loaf.
Milk, butter, eggs and a taste of meat were things to dream of. To make such dreams come true, I would trudge for miles through the surrounding countryside in search of a peasant farmer who could be induced to part with such commodities. My first expedition was unsuccessful because the knowing peasants would only accept US dollars. But one farmer indicated that he would barter food for jewellery, even for clothes. I returned next day with a comparatively unworn shirt, which he exchanged for a small sack of flour. As I wearily dragged this precious cargo back to Zakopane on a toboggan, I realised how weakened I was by hunger. Back in town I bartered some of the flour for a few eggs, a bottle of milk and a small piece of sausage. The hunt for food became my only occupation while my father stayed at home looking after my mother and little Ewa.
6 - Expanding Horizons: Paris and London
- Andrzej Panufnik
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- Book:
- Composing Myself
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 09 January 2024
- Print publication:
- 28 March 2023, pp 110-121
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Back home my family situation was much the same, my mother still unwell, my father dividing his time as ever between constructing violins and trying to make enough money to live. Now, though, I had an adorable baby niece, Ewa: at least in my brother's household everyone was happy.
In Warsaw I found that the storm-clouds over Europe were watched merely with detached disapproval; no one seemed seriously to imagine that Poland might be directly affected. The Colonels who governed our country indulged in occasional bouts of sabre-rattling to demonstrate our unconquerable might, and the general public apparently were fully reassured by these hollow gestures. Certainly I was not. After witnessing the demagogic power of Hitler in Vienna and the almost complete devotion of the German-speaking nations to their Führer – one of the greatest crowd-hypnotisers that mankind has ever known – I was convinced that he would not be easily satisfied with ideological victories, and I fretted that my fellow-countrymen seemed so unaware of the threat to the rest of Europe posed by his dangerous expansionism.
But I did not allow these anxieties to deter me from making my plans for my own life, which meant, as ever, for my music. I wanted to continue my studies abroad. Though Weingartner had passed on to me so much of his great knowledge of classical music, he had never touched on the music of the early twentieth century. For him, Bruckner was almost too modern; Richard Strauss was never discussed (they were said to have quarrelled); and Debussy, in his eyes, was an avant-garde ‘experimentalist’, an adventurer not to be considered. I still longed to experience in live performance the music of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern; also other composers with fresh ideas, such as Stravinsky, Bartók, the French Groupe des Six, and a great many others who were still just names to me. Of course, I also urgently wanted to tackle some serious composition of my own, my creative impulses having temporarily dried up in the painfully disturbing atmosphere of Vienna.
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