Comparing Notes With Lutoslawski

A t 76, Witold Lutoslawski stands as one of the seminal figures of post-World War II composition. Writing in most instrumental forms, he has had an impact in the musical world far out of proportion to his relatively small output.

He began his struggle toward a personal style early, notating compositions at age 9. During the war, his efforts were necessarily submerged, as he played in a piano-duo in a Warsaw cafe. Afterward, he found the arts bureaucracy of Stalinist Poland unreceptive to his work, but by the mid-1950s was gaining a reputation as a conductor of his own works in Poland.

Lutoslawski has championed his cause in Los Angeles, most recently in 1985. On Monday he will talk about his music and life with Los Angeles Philharmonic composer-in-residence Steven Stucky at UCLA. Wednesday at Royce Hall he will lead the Philharmonic Institute Orchestra in a program of his own compositions: “Chain III” (1986), the West Coast premiere of the First Symphony (1947) and the Cello Concerto (1970) with Institute director Lynn Harrell as soloist. Institute members will also offer his String Quartet on a chamber music program Friday, also at UCLA.

A conversation with the avant-garde composer: Question: One of your characteristic traits is your unwillingness to compromise in your creative work, your expression of truth through your music. What does the concept “truth” mean in relation to such a non-semantic art as music?

Answer: What I understand by truth in a piece of music is a genuine, honest expression of what you have to convey to others. Loyalty to yourself, to your own aesthetics, to your own aims. . . . A piece of music is true when it reflects a personal, original artistic conviction without regard for the consequences. You may wonder whether this position is not utterly egocentric and whether society needs art created on the basic of such principles. It is my deep conviction that society needs only such art. A work based on lies, on the abandonment of principles for the sake of transitory, capricious aims like pleasing the tastes of critics or the public, just to get applause or fame or money--those are the works that are not the products of purely artistic motivation!

Q: The 20th Century has granted the intellect absolute dominance in every area of human endeavor, including art. What role do emotion and intuition on the one hand, and rationalism and intellectualism on the other, play in your work?

A: Anyone who is well versed in the composition process cannot fail to notice that the rational factor dominates in my works. Mine is a deliberate, organized working technique--that is true.

However, I ascribe the most fundamental importance to what used to be called inspiration. Although this term may be a bit pompous and imprecise, it is an absolutely irreplaceable one to refer to the attitude, the spiritual state that is essential to the act of creation. Everything that is authentic in a piece of music is the result of inspiration.

Q: There are no operas in your oeuvre, and you have never permitted the use of your music in the ballet. As a composer you clearly imply that music is the most asemantic of the arts, and that any attempt to combine it with extra-musical matters contradicts its fundamental message. . . .

A: I have always subscribed to an abstract concept of music. The only unambiguous message that music in itself can convey is a musical one. Music is music! Of course, that is not an adequate definition, since we know how strongly music affects human emotions. What do they mean? What is their nature? Must these emotions be given “extra” meanings?

Some people are inclined to interpret music in an extramusical way. . . . Less sensitive listeners feel alien in the world of sound; their thoughts escape to a realm of images or feelings that do not exist in a given piece of music. This is a subjective reaction to music.

But there are people of greater musical sensitivity--composers, for instance--who do not have this anxiety reflex, who confront the sounds directly. For them, the sounds are part of such a rich, various beauty that they have no need to search for anything beyond the sounds themselves.

Q: In 1949, your First Symphony was branded a “formalist” piece and banned from public performance in Poland. Why was that infelicitous term so significant in relation to such an asemantic art as music?

A: I never understood what that was supposed to mean. In my opinion it was nothing but typical “art official” jargon, useful for persecuting artists who retained some individuality, whose creativity didn’t conform to the “socialist realism” that was obligatory in Poland at that time.

But in any case, the fact remains that my symphony was labeled formalist and, as such, was not performed in my country for 10 years. After the last performance of the work at the Polish National Philharmonic Hall in 1949, the minister of culture stormed into the conductors’ room and in front of a dozen people announced that a composer like me ought to be thrown under the wheels of a streetcar. It is interesting that this was not meant as a joke--he was really furious! This story is quite true, although nowadays it does sound anecdotal; it is also an illustration of most artists’ situation in Stalinist Poland.

Q: Could you tell me what the sources of your aesthetic, artistic and compositional inspiration were in these days, or even earlier?

A: In my musical career the works of various composers have served as models for me. The Viennese classics, above all; Beet-hoven, as an unequaled master of large-scale forms in general; Haydn and Mozart as well.

Brahms’ symphonies and concertos, on the other hand, despite my sincere love for them, had a negative creative impact on me, and its polemical reaction is evident in many of my works, such as my Second Symphony or String Quartet, which oppose Brahms’ concept of large-scale forms as a matter of principle. . . . I confess that I always feel exhausted after a performance of a Brahms symphony, concerto or even a sonata, probably because there are two main movements--the first and the last--in each of them.

These considerations led me to search for other possibilities, and I finally found a solution in a two-movement large-scale form in which the first movement prepares for the main one to follow. . . . During the first movement, the listener is supposed to expect something more important to happen, and may even grow impatient. This is exactly the situation when the second movement appears and presents the main idea of the work.

This distribution of the musical substance over time seems natural to me, and conforms with the psychology of the perception of music. I have composed several works in this form, the most characteristic being my String Quartet (1964) and Second Symphony (1967).