An edited extract from a BBC Radio 3 programme written and introduced by Gwyn Pritchard in 1993 on the music of Krzysztof Penderecki.

 Krzysztof Penderecki and the question of style

Sixty years ago today the Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki was born, and earlier this year his birthday was celebrated by a series of concerts around Britain in which Penderecki himself conducted the Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra in performances of his music.   The celebration of significant birthdays of well known figures has become so commonplace that we might do well to remind ourselves that, whilst such events may acknowledge the celebrity status of the figure in question, they do not necessarily lead to a closer understanding of his or her supposed achievements, or reveal how far that status is deserved.

In Penderecki's case this is particularly pertinent, as it can be hard to believe that his works from before the mid 1970s and those from after that time are by the same composer. Perhaps it's not surprising that those of us who have grown up in relatively stable cultures, such as western Europe or America, look for consistencies and some form of organic evolution in a composer's output before we feel able to evaluate his achievement. Penderecki however, being Polish, comes from a culture that is anything but stable, and in such a volatile context a lack of concern for continuity of style, though certainly not inevitable, is at least rather less surprising, and so perhaps we should look at his music from other perspectives before we can assess its significance.

Penderecki was born in 1933 near Krakow, and has always been associated with this most cosmopolitan of Polish cities. It was there that he studied composition, at the State Higher School of Music of which he was later to become Rector; and despite spending much time abroad, he still has a home in the area.  A few years after the lifting of musical censorship in Poland in 1956, Penderecki came to the fore as a leading member of the new Polish "avant-garde" group of composers, primarily interested in exploring the textural possibilities of sound, and which became known as "sonorism".  Pieces such as "Threnody", "Anaklasis" and "Polimorphia" soon earned him  international recognition; and ever since that time he has held a prominent position in the world of music, receiving commissions from leading orchestras, opera houses and soloists.

Any list of major post war composers, compiled in the early 1970s, would certainly have included the name of Penderecki, alongside those of Boulez, Stockhausen, Berio, Lutoslawski and others. His inclusion would have been a reflection of the musical public's perception of him as the leading member of the Polish "sonoristic" school; and as such he seemed to many people at that time to offer a new solution to the problem as to where musical developments might lead.  His was a more dramatic and immediate musical language than the rather cerebral approach of the German  avant-garde on the one hand, or the alleatoric music of John Cage and his followers on the other.

However, despite his growing popularity, enthusiasm for his music was far from unanimous, many people finding it too simplistic, and failing to evolve its own internal references, without which it was unable either generate substantial, multi-dimensional musical forms, or to develop stylistically beyond the point that it had reached. Penderecki must have felt something similar about his work, though his solution to the problem has earned him as much disrespect in certain circles as it has popularity in others.  From the St Luke Passion of 1965 onwards more and more conventional 'expressive gestures' became evident alongside the characteristic devices of so-called "sonorism";  and in 1972 he turned his hand to the established musical forms of the concerto and the symphony.  Talking about Penderecki's first symphony Malcolm Rayment said: "Whether this symphony will come to represent a major turning point in Penderecki's career depends on whether he follows it up with other instrumental works which consolidate and develop its structural procedures" and later he added "Penderecki set himself the task of doing what had appeared to be impossible - to retain his own individual methods yet still produce a work that was genuinely symphonic".

That was twenty years ago, but Penderecki's music since that first symphony has been understood by many to suggest that he failed to find that way forward; and in consequence adopted the late romantic, "Brucknerian" style which he has employed ever since.  This left a sense of betrayal amongst many of his former devotees, whose hopes had been raised that he might be the person to find a new, radical but nevertheless accessible musical language.  The enthusiasts for neo-romanticism weren't happy either, pointing to the lack of functional tonal relationships, and large scale harmonically defined phrasing - features so essential to Bruckner, and those other composers that Penderecki claimed to admire.

His supporters would disagree of course, and might seize on my earlier point about understanding him in the context of his Polish background.  It has frequently been suggested that behind that sudden reversal of his position from radical "avant-garde" to overt conservative there lies a consistency of preoccupation with dramatic intensity that makes the matter of style irrelevant. Style as an end in itself is of course irrelevant, but the point remains that Penderecki did not, in the early 1970s, develop a personal style specifically to represent his own musical ideas, but assumed  one that had been appropriate to the ideas of another age.

Composers re-embracing tonality in one form or another, or making reference to past idioms, abound today, and many of them are targeted for the same criticisms that are fired at Penderecki.  But there is an essential difference between Penderecki and composers who fall under the general "postmodern" label, for by and large they are less concerned with history than with its decontextualised imitation as an end in itself.  Penderecki, on the contrary, seems to want to re-enact history to the extent that he abandoned his own immediate past in preference for the rhetoric of a late nineteenth century romantic aesthetic, infused with elements of early twentieth century expressionism. 

Nevertheless, Penderecki still has numerous admirers who count him amongst today's leading composers.  And it could, questionably, be argued that his earlier preoccupation with musical texture has had a lasting influence, which can now be discerned, paradoxically, in the works of composers who probably admire him the least. But whatever varied opinions maybe held as to his musical achievements, one thing is for sure: that Penderecki's uncompromising commitment to his chosen way of working has made him an undeniable presence throughout the musical world for the last thirty years.   

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