Witold Lutoslawski; Polish Composer

Witold Lutoslawski, an internationally recognized Grammy-winning classical composer who led the development of contemporary music in Eastern Europe after World War II, has died in his native Warsaw. He was 81.

Lutoslawski, who died Monday, had been ill for some time. His last public appearance was in September at the Warsaw Autumn Festival of contemporary music, which he helped found in 1956.

“The man who created the great part of Polish 20th-Century music has gone,” fellow Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki said. “He taught us Polish music and introduced it to Europe.”

When the Los Angeles Philharmonic planned an innovative concert of Lutoslawski pieces conducted by the composer in 1983, Times music critic Martin Bernheimer hailed Lutoslawski as “a Pole apart, a dauntless innovator, a probing musical philosopher and, even at (his) age, a forward-looking man of his time.”

“The secret of Lutoslawski’s enduring, and endearing, success,” Bernheimer said, “may lie in his uncanny ability to use unabashedly progressive techniques to achieve unabashedly conservative ends.”

Lutoslawski was last in Los Angeles a year ago to conduct the Los Angeles Philharmonic in the premiere of his Fourth Symphony, which the orchestra had commissioned.

Although he was a modernist known for taking classical sound in new directions, Lutoslawski remained committed to the orchestra, as opposed to electronic substitutes.

“I love traditional instruments, though of course they are anachronisms,” he told The Times last February. “Satellites run around our planet, but we still play bassoons. It’s ridiculous. But a lot of discovery is still left in the symphony orchestra.”

The Fourth Symphony, the last in Lutoslawski’s small but superb output, won him Britain’s Classical Music Award last month.

Lutoslawski’s Third Symphony received a Grammy Award for the best contemporary composition in 1986, and won the first University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for music composition in 1985.

Lutoslawski taught widely in Europe and the United States, ranging from Copenhagen Conservatory to Dartmouth College to Tanglewood to USC, where he was conductor in residence in 1985. He helped inaugurate USC’s Polish Music Reference Center and donated the manuscripts of his compositions “Novelette,” “Mi Parti,” “Preludes and Fugue,” “Mini-Overture” and “Paroles Tissees.”

Lutoslawski studied piano and violin as a child and studied mathematics at the University of Warsaw before turning to the study of music theory and composition at the Warsaw Conservatory.

He served in the Polish Army and was taken prisoner of war by the invading Nazis. Escaping to Warsaw, he spent most of the war playing piano in cafes.

“During the German occupation of Poland in World War II, from 1939 to 1945, all musical life was forbidden,” he told The Times in 1985. “So we made music in cafes. My partner, Andrzej Panufnik, and I played two pianos. And we made arrangements, probably 200 in all, of all kinds of music, from Bach to Ravel’s ‘Bolero.’ ”

Lutoslawski’s problems with creative freedom did not end with the war. Earlier, his compositions were neoclassical with the added influence of Polish folk music. But at war’s end he turned in new directions, attracting the anger of the new Communist rulers.

His First Symphony, which was premiered in 1948, was banned by the Communist government as “formalist.”

“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,” Lutoslawski told The Times four decades later. “It is an illustration of most artists’ situation in Stalinist Poland.”

“I was absolutely sure I would compose what I wanted,” he reminisced last year. “But I was not at all sure it would ever be performed.”

But Lutoslawski continued composing in his unique way, performed for many years as a pianist, and eventually began conducting his own works.

“I have the temperament of a performer, and I don’t feel myself a conductor of my own music,” he told The Times last year. “Rather, I think of myself as the conductor of pieces by a younger colleague, about whom I know more than anybody else. It’s a pleasure for an interpreter.”

Lutoslawski’s work was known for exacting form, with structures described by the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians as “always logical, clear and well-proportioned, so as to suggest a high degree of creative discipline.”

The composer, in a Times interview last year, downplayed such discipline: “A big part of everything I do is intuitive. I have some procedures and I’ve never stopped working on my sound language. I’ve discovered some rules, but in an empirical way, not thought out as doctrine. I test the sound phenomenon I construct with my own emotional reaction to it.

“It’s very easy to write difficult music,” he said. “The real difficulty is to write playable music without compromise.”

Lutoslawski is survived by his wife, Maria.