Lutosławski: Symphony No.3

Witold Lutosławski (1913-1994)

Symphony No.3


Lutosławski’s career, like all artists working in Eastern Europe in the twentieth century, was affected by the regime under which he lived. During the War, when Poland was occupied by the Nazis, he survived by playing piano duets in Warsaw cafés with his friend and fellow composer Andrzej Panufnik. After the war was over, Poland became a communist state under the influence of Stalin’s Russia, and Lutosławski found his First Symphony, completed in 1947, proscribed as “formalist” (the standard soviet term for any art that the authorities did not like for any reason). Like many other composers, he diverted his energies into writing folk-derived music.


After 1956 the regime became slightly less oppressive. The creation of the “Warsaw Autumn” festival of contemporary music enabled many Polish composers to hear and take on the influence of the Western avant-garde for the first time. For Lutosławski, who was old enough to remember the relative freedoms of the 1920s and 30s, it was an opportunity to resume the exploration of paths that had been closed to him. He began to explore the use of chance procedures in his music. Unlike John Cage, the western doyenne of chance in music, Lutosławski’s use of chance procedures is very strict and limited: by freeing the players in an orchestra to play independently he is able to produce complex textures that would be unplayable if notated exactly. In contrast to Cage, the outcome is remarkably predictable and consistent in any performance. At the same time he experimented with dense twelve-note harmonies, using all the notes of the western scale (and occasionally extending to the use of quarter-tones). His Second Symphony of 1967 employs all these ideas in a masterpiece of orchestration.


Lutosławski began to contemplate a third symphony as early as 1974, when during a visit to the USA he received a request from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for a new work. He became unsatisfied with the sketches he made, and the plan stalled. In 1977 he made another attempt but once again rejected his own efforts. Finally in 1981 he began yet again, and this time work proceeded better: the Third Symphony was completed in 1983, and premiered by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Sir Georg Solti that year.


The symphony’s long gestation means that it occupies a transitional place in Lutosławski’s career. During the course of the 1970s he began to refine his style, writing thinner, more lucid textures and increasingly overly melodic lines. The third symphony owes a lot of its character to the contrast between Lutosławski’s older and later styles. Its structure follows a pattern often used by Lutosławski in which the whole divides into two distinct sections. The first is episodic. A dramatic four-note gesture in the brass, inescapably reminiscent of the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, opens the work and sets the woodwind into a flurry of activity. This abruptly peters out, and the brass effectively have to begin the symphony again. A series of episodes follow, which tend to be static and inconclusive; they peter out into woodwind refrains before the opening motif is reasserted. It is as though the orchestra is trying to work out how to respond to the opening gesture.


The second part is a more sustained attempt to find an answer, and is characterised by the alternation of fast, virtuosic passages with slower ones in which a long melody can be heard emerging. The fast ideas are initially dominant. A complex web of counterpoint builds towards a climax, but at the point when a decisive culmination appears to be imminent everything collapses. Out of this failure the melodic idea grows anew, in what Alex Ross describes as “a kind of magnificence without triumph”. Finally everything breaks free in a fast coda, before converging in a decisive final gesture that brings everything full circle.


The early eighties, the period during which Lutosławski worked most intensively on the Third Symphony, was a turbulent and pivotal moment in Polish history. The increasing friction between the communist government and the increasingly open dissent expressed most notably through the trade union Solidarity led in 1981 to the imposition of martial law. Thousands of activists were imprisoned and strikes were broken by military force. Even after the state of emergency was lifted, Poland remained a repressed country. Only after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late eighties did it finally become a free democracy, with Solidarity’s president, Lech Wałęsa, elected as president in 1990.


Lutosławski was always at pains to stress that his music was pure sound and not intended to portray any specific extramusical concern. But, while rejecting speculation in early reviews of the symphony that it portrayed in some manner events in Poland, he qualified his position:

“If we agree that music can mean anything extra-musical, it nevertheless remains ambiguous meaning. But man has a single soul and whatever he experiences in life, must have some influence on him. If man has a single psyche, then the world of sounds, despite its autonomy, is still a function of that psyche. So I would limit myself to stating that if the last movement of the Symphony makes the impression it makes and keeps the listener in suspense, it is certainly not by chance. I would admittedly feel honoured if I managed to express something connected not only to my personal experience but also to that of other people.”