For a few years early on in his career, Krzysztof Penderecki was a symbol of pioneering new music, with composers in the so-called socialist countries avidly listening to his music and studying his scores. György Kurtág, for one, acknowledges to this day his indebtedness to Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima (1959/60) for 52 strings—the lessons he drew from the piece were put to use in his The Sayings of Péter Bornemisza, Op. 7, a “concerto” for soprano and piano of 1963/68.

To quote from Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Classical Musicians: “After a few works of an academic nature, he developed a hyper-modern technique of composition in a highly individual style, in which no demarcation line is drawn between consonances and dissonances, tonal or atonal melody, traditional or innovative instrumentation, an egalitarian attitude prevails toward all available resources of sound.”54

Like Kupkovic but far less drastically, Penderecki at one point turned his back on his avant-garde past and set out instead on a path which seems to run parallel to (or cross) that of Gustav Mahler. I must have been the umpteenth interviewer to have pried into the background of his volte-face, nevertheless, the composer replied without any sign of impatience. Sadly, however, he never responded to my request that he look again at the text of our conversation for the purposes of this book.

There is an episode I would like to record here which throws light on his tremendous popularity in the 1970s when his name seemed to stand for new music as such. Actually, it concerns Witold Lutosławski and his wife Danuta, who spent some time in Budapest in the late 1970s, Witold conducting a concert of his music. He had a day off and I wanted to show him a beautiful Romanesque chapel in Northern Hungary. I drove him to the village of Nagybörzsöny, which in the Middle Ages had been quite prominent as a rich mining settlement. We drove some of the way along the Danube, in a countryside of idyllic beauty. I had been there a number of times but was still as taken with it as on the first occasion. Rather to my disappointment, Witold was immersed in a topic he was expounding on and only spared the most fleeting look at the river and the forest when I pointed them out.