Witold Lutosławski – rozmowa z Iriną Nikolską [I

Joanna Grotkowska
WITOLD LUTOSŁAWSKI – SELF-PORTRAIT
The feature marks the 90th anniversary of Witold Lutosławski’s birth and is
part of the ‘Composers’ Portraits’ series, an EBU project aimed at creating
all-round profiles of the life and work, as well as aesthetic concepts of the
most prominent 20th-century composers,
using archival interviews and
music recordings.
‘Witold Lutosławski – Self-portrait’ consists of the conversations recorded
by Irina Nikolska* in the unique, intimate atmosphere of the composer’s
Warsaw home, his statements for Polish Radio, SSR, SDR, and CBC, as
well as excerpts from the interview with Lutosławski recorded during the
1993 Warsaw Autumn Festival which featured his Fourth Symphony under
the composer’s baton (Lutosławski’s last public performance). The feature
presents the less familar face of Lutosławski, unknown to the general public,
a man of great warmth and a sense of humour.
* Irina Nikolska
Conversations with Witold Lutosławski; published in
Sweden in 1994, the excerpts included in the feature are taken from the
Polish Radio archives.
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(interview with Elżbieta Markowska for Polish Radio, 1990):
W.L.: Naturally, I compose for myself and there is some sort of
mechanism to this process. If you do not write for yourself and instead
write for someone who demands or expects something from us, it is worse
than a betrayal. It is also a swindle because, if you are not true to yourself,
if you do not write what you yourself would like to hear but what someone
else wants, you have to realize that you offer something in which you
yourself do not believe and which you yourself do not strive for.
(interview with Antoine Livio, SSR, Espace 2, Lausanne, 1991):
W.L.: Je ne cesse pas de chercher des solutions nouvelles parce que je
crois que le language doit se renouveler constamment. Mais ce qui est
naturellement à souligner c’est que cela n’a rien à voir à des directions,
disons des “trends’ qui étaient en vogue à ce temps-là. C’était tout à fait
personnel. On m’a parfois demandé si j’étais membre d’un groupe ou si je
suivais quelques méthodes qui étaient en vogue en ce temps-là – non, alors
– jamais. Je ne trouvais rien qui pourrait vraiment me servir à réaliser ce
que je voulais. Alors il fallait faire tout nouveau; si c’est très nouveau cela
c’est tout fait autre chose, c’est probablement très subjectif comme
nouveauté. Mais il faut faire toujours quelque chose qui soit frais, qui ne
soit pas utilisé trop longtemps par moi-même.
J’ai commencé à ce temps-là à utiliser les opérations aléatoires,
naturellement, d’une façon, qui était conforme à ce que je voulais réaliser.
C’est à dire je n’étais pas du tout intéressé, comme vous savez très bien,
dans la musique tout à fait détérminée par la chance. Donc cela m’intéresse
pas du tout. Cela me sert seulement pour enrichir le language musical;
c’est à dire surtout l’organisation du temps où il y a des combinaisons
impossibles à réaliser autrement; des phénomènes rythmiques qui sont
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assez compliqués, assez riches et qui ne sont pas possibles à réaliser avec
les barres de mesure et le metrum. Cela a beaucoup enrichi mon language.
Et puis aussi je voulais à ce temps-là rétablir le plaisir de faire de la
musique. Quand on joue ad libitum dans un ensemble c’est tout à fait autre
chose que quand on joue des modèles très difficiles rythmiquement, et on
doit suivre le mètre compliqué et tout cela...
Cela fait de la musique cauchemar parfois, vous savez, pour les musiciens.
Alors cela, c’était aussi encore une raison. Ce qui trahit parce que cela
sonne autrement qund on joue avec plaisir.
J’étais toujors passioné par la grande forme symphonique surtout et je
voulais trouver une solution satisfaisante pour moi, ce qui n’était pas facile
parce que je crois que l’équilibre idéal c’était dans des grandes oeuvres des
classiques viennois, comme Haydn p.e. où il y avait toujours un seul
mouvement le plus important et puis les autres, qui sont moins importants.
De cette façon il a toujours obtenu cet équilibre et cette portion juste de la
musique dans une grande forme. Alors je me suis dit qu’il fallait faire
quelque chose de ce genre mais naturellemnt j’ai procédé différamment.
J’ai trouvé cette solution dans une forme bipartite, où il y a une
introduction, qui est plutôt la musique pour engager l’auditeur, pour
l’intéresser, pour intriguer, mais jamais satisfaire. Alors ce sentiment
d’impatience doit arriver à un certain moment à la fin de ce mouvement
d’introduction et c’est le moment juste de présenter le mouvement général,
important.
(interview for SDR, 1971):
W.L.: Wenn ich doch das Wort Inspiration gebrauche, ist das nur zu
zeigen, daß – was wir intelekutell bearbeiten – muß man regelmäßig
arbeiten. Ohne Arbeit, ohne Denken, gibt es keine Inspiration. Was ich als
Inspiration nenne, sind die Ideen, die in eine Teil des Sekunde, eine
Fraktion der Sekunde kommen. Man wird vielleicht nicht wissen woher
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und wie, in welche Weise... Das sind die Ideen, die – natürlich – endlich
ein Wert eine Komposition determinieren.
(journalist):
Inklisive,
der
Summe
der
Erfahrung...
darf
man
wahrscheinlich sagen...?
W.L.: Ja, sicher, sicher. Die Erfahrungen, die Arbeit, die regelmäßige
Arbeit und die ständige Entwicklung der Klangmaterie, der Klagsprache...
Eigene, persönlische Klangsprache ist natürlich unbedingt um irgend
etwas, was ich Inspiration genannt habe, komme.
(interview for Canadian Broadcasting Corporation CBC, “The Arts
tonight”, 1993):
W.L.: I think about the players a lot. That means my ambition is to write
playable music. I think that to write difficult music is very easy. And I
don’t want to propose difficulties which are not really necessary. And what
about the audience? I don’t think about the audience at all, because I don’t
know how they hear music. We don’t know how the other people hear
music. It’s as with colours. I don’t know whether your red is the same red
as mine. Maybe it is like my green. The only way to be honest is to write
for oneself, but it is not just pure egoism, because one can always assume
that there are people to whom one is similar and they will find something
in my music.
(interview with Andrzej Chłopecki, Polish Radio, September, 1992):
W.L.: It is natural that out of the two 20th-century traditions, those of
Schoenberg and Debussy, it is with the latter that I feel some affinity. It is
not perhaps an imitation but a certain continuation. But not only. I think
that without the tradition of the Viennese school I would not have been
able to write my four symphonies or any of my large-scale forms. I find it
easier to speak about tradition rooted in the history of music than about
some kind of personal traditions because this requires insight into myself,
which is not easy.
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Is this a synthesis? Perhaps it is. I am glad you stressed the melodic aspect
of my music. This is something I have been working on for several
decades. The melodic aspect has been held in contempt for a good many
decades and I think it’s high time we re-discovered the sense of melody in
a musical work. However, this is not in any way retrogressive. I don’t
believe in going back to anything which would have links to 19th-century
melodic ideas.
Andrzej Chłopecki: No other composition of yours begins in a similar
way to the Fourth Symphony. This is not only a matter of melody, but we
have here also something that was lost in the 20th century, that is
accompaniment.
W.L.: Yes, there is no doubt about it. I’d like to point to the fact that what
accompanies these single lines is an elaborate consequence of harmony.
Without this harmony the melody would not work here as it does.
A.Ch.: You said that all this stems from your harmonic language and that
this is very much a matter of chance, I mean the fact that these opening
notes produce for instance the phenomenon of minor thirds rather than,
say, a tritone-seventh sequence.
If you chose them, particularly in the accompaniment, it must be because,
after all, the major-minor system is trying to make its presence felt, as it
were.
W.L.: I don’t think so. In my view we assign too broad a meaning to the
notion of tonality. I think it should be reduced to the major-minor system,
the way you put it. You are right to use terminology which does not refer
to tonality because it is assumed that if someone writes thirds, triads or a
seventh-based chord, then this is tonal music. This is not the case. I believe
that an escape from consonaces which appear in an entirely different
system or combination and perform a different role is nonsense. It appears
as something to be ashamed of. One is afraid that the outcome would be
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tonal. But this is not tonal. Of course, some listeners instantly associate this
with many things which are not present in this piece at all.
A.Ch.: There comes at long last a moment when consonance is
emancipated. Throughout history we have had a constant fight for the
emancipation of dissonance, eventually history won...
W.L.: This is a very good point about the emancipation of consonance.
The thing is, however, that within the sound system on which I have been
working for several decades the notions of consonance and dissonance are
in fact misleading. It is believed that consonance and dissonance are
contradictory, something which can be placed on a straight line, to refer to
mathematical terminology. In other words that it is either plus or minus,
whereas in the sound system which I explore one cannot say what is
consonance and what is dissonance. They are different entities and I
deliberately use these terms because they don’t say anything. If I said
‘character’ or ‘atmosphere’ I would suggest something non-musical. And
this is not the gist of it. Returning to the melodic aspect, if I select the
intervals from which I compose my melodies, there’s quite a number of
them: perfect fourths and fifths and major seconds on the one hand and, on
the other, minor seconds and their counterparts as well as tritones. These
are two contrasting poles and between them there is a vast space offering
very rich possibilities. Unfortunately few of my colleaques explore
harmonies as an outcome of selecting intervals. The harmonic and melodic
aspect are mutually interwoven.
A.Ch.: We know the concept of form in your pieces. The opening section
is like an invitation which is to create a certain impatience, after which the
main section follows. It gives full aesthetic satisfaction. I must admit that
in the Fourth Symphony this principle has not been implemented.
W.L.: Indeed! It has not been implemented in this shape. This principle is
not present at all. This is simply an Adagio followed by an Allegro and
that’s all. There’s also an Epilogue. Why didn’t I return to the same form
in which I wrote the Second Symphony, the String Quartet, the Third
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Symphony and various other pieces? Because I got bored with all this, I
wanted to write something different...(laughter). This is not to say that I
won’t ever return to it in some other shape; I simply didn’t want to write in
the same fashion.
Translated into English by Michał Kubicki
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