So I guess we ought to talk about Penderecki, who died yesterday. On the one hand, there's no world in contemporary music where Krzystopf Penderecki was underrated, if anything, I wonder if we slightly overrated him. On the other hand, how many people listen to contemporary classical music? Short of maybe Arvo Pärt, there's literally no composer in our day of serious concert music whom you can even argue gets a proper hearing. Not even Philip Glass or John Adams, it's debatable that even Arvo Pärt gets a fair hearing.
I had mixed feelings about Penderecki. There is no question of his significance. He is one of the pre-eminent voices of our time, at the very center of the 'Polish Composers' School': a generation of genius that begins with Witold Lutoslawski and goes through Panufnik, Baird, Kilar, Gorecki, and Penderecki.
Per the size of his reputation, was Penderecki greater than the greatest of the others? Certainly not in my not completely educated opinion. I have a particular fondness for Andrzej Panufnik, but Penderecki is an essential composer, one of the crucial voices of music whose music speaks not just for him, but for Poland, for the Bloodlands, for the Twentieth Century, and particularly for all in that very deadly time and place who perished.
Penderecki was certainly a composer for his time, whose embrace of the avant-garde was perfect for the moment in the 60s when his severe dissonances exploded through the Iron Curtain as though to say that Social Realism was dead and the artist was still free to compose as he liked. Penderecki later admitted that his music in that period gave the unfortunate impression that life under communism was freer than it actually was.
Try as I did rather hard, I could never get particularly into those 80 minute avant-garde monsterpieces like the St. Luke Passion or Utrenja or even the Polish Requiem. It's a lot to ask of even the most obsessive listener to listen to well over an hour of unremitting dissonance and darkness. In my strong opinion, the best music of those years is the short stuff. Everybody knows the Threnody for Hiroshima, even if they think they don't. It's in so many of the most crucial scenes in Kubrick's The Shining, it was in Children of Men, it was in Twin Peaks and Black Mirror.... This music is, quite literally, the sound of horror, and the kind of music you would expect from a composer who grew up near Auschwitz.
Similarly Polymorphia, another piece for a massive and individually scored string section, is featured not just in The Shining but also in The Exorcist. These avant-garde years have all these brief dissonant masterpieces: Canticum Canticorum Salomonis, Psalms of David, The Dream of Jacob, De Natura Sonoris. Like Webern, albeit at least a little larger, they make the most extraordinary sounds, and then they're over: if the larger statement pieces never seemed to end, he had a great dinner guest's instinct in the small pieces for when it was time to leave.
On the other hand, a true sign of Penderecki's greatness was his willingness to evolve over time. Once he hit forty, he gradually became very, VERY different. The Polish Requiem, which I'm listening to right now, is definitely still the same funerary expressionist of earlier years, grandson of Schönberg and younger brother to Bernd Alois Zimmermann, but the horizons have broadened, and you hear that he's brought the light of tonal chords back in. He never completely lets go of his old chromaticism in extremis, but it's balanced by other elements. This music is not 'tonality' per se, certainly not tonality as modern Bachian harmony understands it, but rather the counterpoint and modality of the Church's earlier incarnations. The counterpoint is pure Renaissance: Palestrina, Josquin. But the harmonies go back to the modes of the early church, perhaps Machaut or Perotin, and perhaps even further back into the monophonic chants of the early Middle Ages. By the time he gets to the Credo in 1998, it's almost too simple. So completely different and simple does his idiom become there are all sorts of passages that could be mistaken for Arvo Pärt or John Williams. The totality is more complex than either of those two contemporaries of his, but it speaks to how dramatic his evolution was. Extremely talented artists can mine a single vein their whole careers, but great artists evolve, and the fact that Penderecki can change so dramatically over the course of his career tempts one to re-evaluate the early thorny music in light of what he later became.
Penderecki, like so many Poles, was quite religious and lived his life in the environs of Krakow, the city of Pope John Paul II, but by ancestry, Penderecki was mostly Armenian, not Polish, and he worshipped at an Armenian church rather than one of Krakow's many, many Catholic parishes. Perhaps spiritual bent rather foreordained his return to much older conceptions of music that have very little to do with the modernity his young self embraced with such a vengeance.
But my favorite piece by him is The Seven Gates of Jerusalem. Not necessarily because of its Jewish theme, but because it is as close as Penderecki came to finding the perfect blend of complexity and simplicity to sustain interest over a full hour. It is technically called a symphony, but it's one of the last great choral works of the 20th century, and at this point at least, I would easily take it over the more iconic earlier choral works like St. Luke and Utrenja.
But there is no way that I can make that the link here when this video exists:
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