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The Inspiration of Krzysztof Penderecki: A Personal Retrospective from the United States

2021; Indiana University Press; Volume: 37; Linguagem: Inglês

10.2979/inditheorevi.37.1.05

2474-7777

Gebuhr, Hatten,

Music Technology and Sound Studies

The Inspiration of Krzysztof Penderecki:A Personal Retrospective from the United States* Ann K. Gebuhr (bio) and Robert S. Hatten (bio) ANN: Quite a few years ago, when I was a young Master's degree student at Indiana University, a good friend and mentor suggested the works of Krzysztof Penderecki to me as a possible thesis topic. Penderecki was in his mid-thirties at the time, and he had already made a rather large impression on the musical world with two works that have become intrinsically identified with music of the last half of the twentieth century, Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima for fifty-two string instruments, and The Passion and Death of Our Lord Jesus Christ According to St. Luke for double choir, boys' choir, soloists, narrator, and large orchestra. I bought recordings of those two works and was both overwhelmed and intrigued: overwhelmed because of their avant-garde, revolutionary nature, and intrigued because they spoke profoundly as music to everyone who heard them. I chose an additional piece, his Dies Irae for soloists, choir, and orchestra, and became immersed in his compositional style and sound for the next year and a half.1 That experience and study has had a profound impact upon [End Page 151] my own compositional language—not in terms of specific techniques, but as sound which communicated something elemental, something which touched and moved and enriched the very core of its perceivers.2 Robert: I met Ann in 1976, when we were both beginning our doctoral studies in music theory at Indiana University.3 I was also impressed upon encountering the sonoristic works of Penderecki, but my scholarly engagement came about indirectly, through my participation in the early Beethoven Easter Festivals organized by his wife, Elżbieta Penderecka, and the academic symposia inspired by Professors Tomaszewski, Malecka, and Chłopicka of the Kraków Academy of Music. There, I also met another American, Ray Robinson, a choral conductor who had written extensively on Penderecki's work.4 Since I had taught a course on twentieth-century opera, it was not completely out of my field of expertise (primarily devoted to musical meaning in Beethoven) to accept an invitation to present a paper on the occasion of Penderecki's 65th birthday, at an International Symposium in Krakow.5 I demonstrated how each of Penderecki's four major stage works, from Devils of Loudon to The Black Mask, might be understood [End Page 152] as in dialogue with significant twentieth-century trends in opera and sacra rappresentazione (Paradise Lost), and with musical styles or operatic subjects as found in theatrical works by Schoenberg, Berg, Stravinsky, Hindemith, Prokofiev, Messiaen, Zimmerman, Ligeti, and others. Penderecki explored styles ranging from expressionist to post-modern and reflecting his theatrical ventures into the grotesque and absurd (Ubu rex), with textures ranging from his innovative sonoristic style to Webernesque pointillism and allusions to late Romantic chromaticism.6 These four works by themselves reflect a remarkable span of exploration and integration, but they are but one strand of an extraordinary career that stretches from his earliest electronic and experimental works to the intimate late chamber works. It was Ray, and his co-editor Regina Chłopicka of the Kraków Academy of Music, who next encouraged me to contribute to the second volume of his three-volume periodical, Studies in Penderecki, for which I combined analysis and interpretation to explore the eclectic inspirations and stylistic syntheses of Penderecki's award-winning Psalms of David (1958).7 Ann and Robert: Penderecki's commitment to the humane side of music goes hand in hand with his ongoing engagement with spiritual issues, as so compelling surveyed by Regina Chłopicka in her interpretive study of the vocal-instrumental works.8 From his first masterwork in this realm, the St. Luke Passion, to his widely performed Polish Requiem, and culminating in his late Credo, Penderecki essayed three powerfully transformative encounters with the genres of passion, [End Page 153] requiem, and mass. His original conceptions explored both the public and private dimensions of these liturgical genres, reconceiving them to reflect the existential struggles and conflicts of the twentieth century.9 One may find analogous spiritual conflicts...