To say that the music was Wladyslaw Szpilman's life-blood is more than just a poetic metaphor. The Polish composer and pianist literally owes his miraculous survival of the Holocaust to music.
Born in the Polish town of Sosnowiec on 5 December 1911, after first piano lessons Wladyslaw Szpilman continued his piano studies at the Warsaw Conservatory under A. Michalowski and subsequently at the Academy of Arts (Akademie der Kuenste) in Berlin under Arthur Schnabel and Leonid Kreutzer. He also studied composition under Franz Schreker. In 1933, he returned to Warsaw where he quickly became a celebrated pianist and a composer of both classical and popular music. From 1945 to 1963 he held the position of Director of Music at Polish Radio. During these years he composed several symphonic works and about 500 songs, many of which still are popular in Poland today, including some children's songs, as well as music for radio plays and film. He also performed as a soloist and with the violinists Bronislav Gimpel, Roman Totenberg, Ida Haendel, Tadeusz Wronski and Henryk Szeryng. In 1963, he and Gimpel founded the Warsaw Piano Quintet with which Szpilman performed world-wide until 1986.
The German invasion of Warsaw on 23 September 1939 put an untimely but temporary end to Szpilman's musical career when a bomb, dropped on the studios of Polish Radio, interrupted his performance of Chopin's Nocturne in C Sharp minor. Yet despite the inevitable changes to his life, brought about by the onset of war, Szpilman refused to give up his music. His Concertino for piano and orchestra was composed while he was experiencing the hardships and deprivation of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1940. Time after time, Szpilman managed to escape the deportations. Even when he and his entire family were packed into cattle trucks to be sent off to Treblinka, the famous pianist was miraculously picked out and spared from the death camp. He fled to the Aryan part of the city and spent two long and agonising years in hiding, always assisted by loyal Polish friends. After the Warsaw Uprising he continued to lead the life of a recluse in the deserted ghost town. Towards the end of the war, he was discovered by a German officer of the Wehrmacht, Wilm Hosenfeld, who saved his life after listening to the starved pianist play Chopin's C Sharp minor Nocturne on the out-of-tune piano of his hiding-place.
When Szpilman resumed his activities as the Director of Music at Polish Radio in 1945, he did so by carrying on where he left off six years before: poignantly, he opened the transmission by playing, once again, Chopin's C Sharp minor Nocturne.
Wladyslaw Szpilman died on 6 July 2000 in Warsaw.
The "Palme dOr" , three "Oscars" and various European film prizes were among the awards collected by "The Pianist", Roman Polanskis film based upon Wladyslaw Szpilmans bestseller book "The Pianist" , dealing with his "miraculous survival" (as he called it) in Warsaw during the German occupation and final destruction between 1938 and 1945. But there is more to Szpilman than being "The Pianist". He is increasingly being noticed as a composer, both of concert works and of music in a lighter vein.
NOW ON DVD!
"It's the story I've been looking for for years..."
Adrien Brody accepting the Oscar Award:
..."This film would not be possible without the blueprint provided by Wladyslaw Szpilman. This is a tribute to his survival"...
Los Angeles Times Bestsellers List - The Best Books of 1999 - BEST NONFICTION OF 1999
Boston Globe - The most disturbing and moving book of the year
The Sunday Times - Biography top five & 1999 bestsellers
THE GUARDIAN - Books of the year 1999
The Economist - Our reviewers' favourites 1999
LIBRARY JOURNAL - Best Books of 1999
WLADYSLAW SZPILMAN WINS ANNUAL JEWISH QUARTERLY-WINGATE NON FICTION PRIZE 2000
London - 3rd May 2000 - The judges of the annual Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Literary Prizes tonight awarded this year's Non Fiction Prize to Wladyslaw Szpilman for The Pianist (Phoenix / Golancz). The decision was announced by author and broadcaster Frank Delaney, chairman of the judges, who had selected it earlier this evening from a shortlists of four titles: "When you read this book - and you must read it - you will never forget it. The subtext asks whether good people were on the side of the evil people and shows how the human spirit is enlarged by the knowledge of such people."
Le Pianiste a été élu Meilleur livre de l'année 2001 par la rédaction du magazine Lire
Le Pianiste - Grand Prix des Lectrices de ELLE en 2002
Independent, 14 August 2000
When the shells of the invading Nazis forced the closure of Polish Radio on 23 September 1939, the last live music heard was Wladyslaw Szpilman's performance of Chopin's C sharp minor Nocturne. When broadcasting was resumed in 1945, it was again Szpilman who initiated the transmissions, with the same Chopin nocturne. (Around the same time, rather less high-mindedly, BBC television resumed an interrupted Mickey Mouse cartoon.) What happened to Szpilman in the interim formed the stuff of one of the most harrowing of all accounts of Jewish life under the Nazis, in a book published last year as The Pianist that immediately climbed to the top of the international bestseller lists --- hardly surprisingly: it is a compelling, harrowing masterpiece.
Szpilman wrote Death of a City (the initial title of his memoir) in 1945 more or less as therapy --- to put his memories down on paper and thus somehow to externalise them. In doing so he revealed that he was a masterly writer: his text matches a sharp eye for detail and for human character with a complete absence of self-pity and of sanctimony.
For the first two years of the occupation Szpilman played in the bars and cafés that continued to open for business behind the walls of the ghetto, sealed off from the rest of Warsaw on 15 November 1940. Szpilman records life there with dignity and dispassion. He recalls watching the SS forcing a group of prisoners out of a building:
They switched on the headlights of their car, forced their prisoners to stand in the beam, started the engines and made the men run ahead of them in the white cone of light. We heard convulsive screaming from the windows of the building, and a volley of shots from the car. The men running ahead of it fell one by one, lifted into the air by the bullets, turning somersaults and describing a circle, as if the passage from life to death consisted of an extremely difficult and complicated leap.
Time and again, chance dictated that Szpilman escape death. The end seemed finally to have come when he and his family were ordered to turn up at the Umschlagsplatz where, skirting the rotting corpses around them, they were to be herded onto trains headed for the gas chambers. Szpilman's last memory of his family is movingly understated:
At one point a boy made his way through the crowd in our direction with a box of sweets on a string round his neck. He was selling them at ridiculous prices, although heaven knows what he was going to do with the money. Scraping together the last of our small change, we bought a single cream caramel. Father divided it into six parts with his penknife. That was our last meal together.
But as the Szpilmans were being crammed onto the train, one of the Jewish policemen grabbed Wladyslaw by the collar, yanked him out of the throng and refused to let him through to rejoin his family on the journey to death. Szpilman continued to avoid death's clutches, surviving against all odds, often half-starved and usually alone, hidden in obscure corners of bombed, burned or empty buildings, intermittently helped by Polish friends risking their own lives to bring him food or find him shelter: helping a Jew automatically brought a death sentence. The strangest twist in Szpilman's strange story came at its end: he was discovered by a German officer who, after Szpilman had given proof of his profession by playing that same C sharp minor Nocturne on an abandoned piano, hid him and brought him food and an eiderdown for warmth.
Not the least extraordinary aspect of Szpilman's book is the complete lack of the indignation and anger that anyone writing immediately after such years of hell might reasonably be expected to allow himself. Yet even the grim vignettes of pointless death that are studded through his text don't draw judgement --- perhaps because none was necessary:
A boy of about ten came running along the pavement. He was very pale, and so scared that he forgot to take off his cap to a German policeman coming towards him. The German stopped, pulled his revolver without a word, put it to the boy's temple and shot. The child fell to the ground, his arms flailing, went rigid and died. The policeman calmly put his revolver back in its holster and went on his way. I looked at him; he did not even have particularly brutal features, nor did he appear angry. He was a normal, placid man who had carried out one of his many minor daily duties and put it out of his mind again at once, for other and more important business awaited him.
Death of a City was published in Poland in 1946 and soon suppressed by the Communists because, as Wolf Biermann surmises in an Epilogue to The Pianist, it "contained too many painful truths about the collaboration of defeated Russians, Poles, Ukrainians, Latvians and Jews with the German Nazis". More likely, it was Szpilman's record of the suffering of the Jews that required silencing after all, the Jews could hardly expect a warmer welcome in Stalin's empire than in Hitler's: when Stalin died, in March 1953, he was already assembling the transport for his own eastwards "resettlement" of the Jews, and his own death prevented would probably have been a second Holocaust. And so it was only after the collapse of the Soviet bloc that, thanks to the efforts of Szpilman's son, publication became possible.
Szpilman's initial training as a pianist was in the Chopin School of Music in Warsaw under Josef Smidowicz and Aleksander Michalowski, both of them former students of Liszt. In 1931 he enrolled at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, studying piano under two of the most distinguished players of the day, Arthur Schnabel and Leonid Kreuzer, and composition under Franz Schreker, the renowned composer of Der ferne Klang and other similarly successful operas. On his return to Poland in 1933 he formed a highly successful duo with the violinist Bronislaw Gimpel that formed the basis, 29 years later, of the Warsaw Piano Quintet, whose tours soon earned it a reputation as an ensemble of world standing; Szpilman played with the Quintet until 1986.
Szpilman's own early compositions include a violin concerto and a symphonic suite, The Life of Machines, and when the Nazis invaded he was engaged on a Concertino for piano and orchestra --- a jazz-flavoured, Gershwinesque piece remarkably good-natured for the circumstances of its origin. The score went with him from hiding-place to hiding-place before he had to sacrifice it to survival; he reconstructed it after the War. His light music was particularly successful: for decades the Poles sang tunes from his three musicals, 50---60 children's songs and 600-odd chansons as they went about the business of their daily lives.
A CD released in 1998 by the German label Alina (run by Szpilman's son, Andrzej) testifies to both his fluency as a composer and his excellence as a pianist --- and it includes an archive recording of that life-saving Chopin nocturne. Six more CDs of Szpilman as both performer and composer are scheduled for release in Poland in the autumn. With luck his last-minute fame as a writer will bring his music the wider currency he would have wished for it during his lifetime.
Wladyslaw Szpilman, pianist and composer, born 5.December.1911, Sosnowiec, Poland; married Halina Grzecznarowski, 2 sons; died Warsaw, 6 July 2000.
"I will never forgive myself that I was unable to do anything to save them..." - Wladyslaw Szpilman tells Anne Applebaum the extraordinary story of his survival in war-torn Warsaw. Evening Standard, 14.5.99 (Read more)
In tune with history
The Pianist book is a vivid look at occupied Poland Author's son worked years to get it published
Films, if they are resonant enough, have a way of sending people back to their source materials, a phenomenon for which the publishing industry is duly grateful. Who was that character we see for a few seconds? What really happened after the events portrayed in the movie?
The truth is, we will never trust movies the way we tend to trust books to deliver the real story.
A glance at the New York Times best seller list shows that Virginia Woolf's 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway, the inspiration forThe Hours, is No. 11 on the fiction list and climbing. Catch Me If You Can, the memoirs of conman Frank Abagnale, The Gangs Of New York by Herbert Asbury (first published in 1928), and The Pianist by Wladyslaw Szpilman are non-fiction best sellers.
The last of these is worth a closer look. Before Roman Polanski's The Pianist became possibly the best film ever made about the Holocaust, before it won the Palme d'Or at Cannes and garnered seven Oscar nominations, this story of the against-all-odds survival of the Jewish musician in German-occupied Poland was a book with an unusual publishing history.
Szpilman witnessed the full horror of the Warsaw ghetto then saw his parents, sisters and brother forced by the SS into cattle cars bound for certain death in Treblinka.
Miraculously pulled out of the lineup for the train and urged to flee by a Jewish collaborationist policeman, he was assigned to work on a building crew in the ghetto, then escaped and hid for more than two years in the progressively more starved and ruined city with the help of members of the Polish resistance. Near the end of the war, he was discovered in an attic and protected by a nameless Wehrmacht officer, who brought him bread and jam and an eiderdown for warmth.
Szpilman, who died in 2000 at the age of 88, wrote down this amazing story immediately after the liberation of Poland, which gives it unparalleled authenticity. More remarkable is his complete lack of indignation, anger or self-pity in the telling.
"My father was told by a doctor that he should see a psychiatrist because of the trauma he went through. Or he could do auto-therapy writing it down," Szpilman's son Andrzej explains over the phone from Hamburg, Germany.
"He was working as music director for Polish radio and he had a secretary. He dictated the book to her. It took him 3 1/2 months."
The memoir was published in Polish in 1946 as Smierc Miasta meaning Death Of A City, then went out of print.
"In the 1960s the director of a publishing house approached my father and said he would like to print the book again but he had to ask permission of the Communist Party central committee. Two weeks later, he came back and said the committee said `No.' They gave no reason, but I think they did not want to touch the question of minorities and also, the Soviets were supposed to be our friends."
The book, which ends with the kindly German army officer getting captured by Soviets, presents too complex a view of human nature for any dictatorship to stomach. Poles, Jews, Germans as well as the Russian liberators are all shown to be capable of evil as well as decency.
In 1950, Wladyslaw Szpilman married a doctor, Halina Grzecznarowski, and had two sons. Andrzej, 46, who plays the violin but is a dental surgeon by profession, is the more musical son, devoted to the memory of his father. (An elder, Christopher, is a history professor living in Japan.)
That the book got a new lease on life after 50 years and found its way to Roman Polanski was due largely to Andrzej's persistence.
Andrzej was living in Germany after the fall of communism in Poland, teaching dentistry at the university in Hamburg and producing records on the side. He recorded the poet Wolf Biermann, whom he describes as "the German Bob Dylan," and told him about his father.
Biermann asked around and discovered that a Polish-German translator had, in fact, translated and published a couple of chapters from Szpilman's out-of-print book. "I paid her to finish the whole book so that my friend Wolf could read it," recalls Andrzej.
"I met a publisher in Hamburg at a party and told her I had a translation of the book, and it was available. She said right away, `I'll take it,'" he says. It came out in Germany in `98 with Biermann's epilogue.
Andrzej ran into a friend in Monte Carlo who told him of an English literary agent, Christopher Little, who might be able to arrange for British publication. Andrzej sent him the book, not realizing he had lucked out: Christopher Little, who represents J.K. Rowling, of Harry Potter fame, is the hottest British literary agent. The Pianist was translated by Anthea Bell and published by Victor Gollancz in 1999, with Wladyslaw and Andrzej coming to England for the book's launch. Picked as one of the year's best books by The Sunday Times, The Guardian and The Economist, The Pianist was sold by Christopher Little to 21 other countries including, at last, Poland. The book sold 320,000 copies in France and 200,000 in Poland, where Szpilman was best known as a composer of popular songs.
"If you ask me why I did it (republish his father's book) I felt we had to bring this message to the people," says Andrzej. "There is a strong ethnic nationalism coming back in Europe this book is warning."
The current paperback version of the book (distributed in Canada by McArthur & Co.) includes extracts from the diary of Capt. Wilm Hosenfeld, a devout Catholic who, it turns out, saved several Jews besides Szpilman. It was from one of these other Jews that Szpilman learned his name in 1950 and tried to get him out of the prisoner-of-war camp in Russia, where he was tortured and died.
According to Andrzej Szpilman, Polanski's lawyer bought the book and sent it to Polanski with a note: "Here is your next movie." Little sold film rights to Polanski in Jan. 2000.
"We saw the movie for the first time in Cannes, with my mother and brother. My son, who is 10, had a very small part in it," says Andrzej. "It was very moving, a shock. Adrien Brody is very like my father. Since then I have seen it 15 times. In Poland 3,500 people saw the premier and applauded for 20 minutes. The Polish president and prime minister were there." Hosenfeld's children were also there.
These days, Andrzej Szpilman has taken leave of his dental surgery practice to devote himself entirely to making sure his father's music legacy three musicals, around 50 children's songs and 600 pop tunes is not lost.
He recently produced a CD with 12 of his father's songs sung in English by Montrealer Wendy Lands (Wendy Lands Sings The Music Of The Pianist, on the Hip-O label).
When the Germans bombed the radio building in Warsaw in 1939, Szpilman was in the middle of Chopin's Nocturne in C-sharp minor. He resumed playing it six years later when the war ended. Sony has issued five CD's and CD sets of Szpilman playing Bach, Brahms, Schumann, Rachmaninoff and his beloved Chopin. In the post-war years, Wladyslaw Szpilman continued to perform classical music as part of a duo with the violinist Bronislaw Gimpel, and later with the Warsaw Piano Quintet until 1986.
His belated fame as a memoirist will, ironically, assure his fame as a musician. by JUDY STOFFMAN Toronto Star Mar. 1, 2003
Wladyslaw Szpilman was born in on December 5th, 1911 in Sosnowiec/Poland.
On leaving school, he went to Warsaw to study music (piano) in the Chopin School of Music, under Professor Jozef Smidowicz, and later, under Professor Aleksander Michalowski (both scholars of Franz List).
In 1931 he went to Berlin to the Academy of Music studying under Professor Leonid Kreutzer and Arthur Schnabel (piano) and Professor Franz Schrecker (composition).
At this time he wrote his Violin Concerto, Piano Suite "Zycie Maszyn" (The Life of Machines), Concertino for piano with Orchestra, many works for piano and violin and also some songs.
In 1935 Szpilman entered the Polish Radio, where, except during the war, he has worked until 1963.
In 1946 he published his book "Death of a City"- memories from 1939 to 1945.
Since 1945 Szpilman has appeared in concerts as a soloist and with chamber groups in Poland, throughout Europe and in America.
He and Bronislav Gimpel have formed a very successful piano duet (since 1932), which grew in 1962 to "The Warsaw Piano Quintet ", that performed about 2500 concerts until 1987 in whole world with exception of Australia.
Since 1936 he started also his career as a composer of songs (about 500). About 150 of them were in a pop-charts of Poland and they are until today "evergreen's" of a polish popmusic culture.
In the 50`s he wrote also about 40 songs for children, for which he received in 1955 the award of the Polish Composers Union.
He wrote also many orchestral pieces (Ballet, Small Overture a.o.),musicals,music for children theater and a music for about 50 children radio broadcast, as well as film music 1937- "Wrzos", 1939 - "Dr. Murek", 1950- "Pokoj zwyciezy swiat", 1957- "Call my wife" a.o.
In 1961 he initiated and organized International Songs Festival in Sopot - Poland aslso founded Polish Union of Authors of Popular Music.
Since 1964 he was member of Presidium of Polish Composers Union, and ZAIKS (Polish "ASCAP").
In April 1998 his book "The Pianist" was published by a main German publisher the ECON Verlag with commentar of a famous German writer and poet - Wolf Biermann. Wladyslaw Szpilman died on July 6th, 2000 in Warsaw.
WARSAW PIANO QUINTET
Bronislaw Gimpel: first violin.
Born 1911 in Lwow in a family of musicians. His father was orchestra chief, and his brother Jakob, pianist. He has studied the violin to the conservatory of Lwow with the professor Wolfsthal, and has begun to play in public in the age of 8 years. He has continued his studies to Comes with Robert Pollack, and has begun to give concerts with the Orchestra philharmonique of Comes with 14 years, while being the pupil of Carl Flesch.
Gimpel, that played on a Guarnerius having belonged to Paganini, has left to United States in 1943 to escape Nazi persecutions. From 1945, he has been committed to New York as chief and soloist of the Orchestra of the radio. He has played a lot of music with some groups that he had based.Since 1968 he was Professor of Violin Class of Blummington School of Music. He died in 1978.
Wladislaw Szpilman: piano.
Tadeusz Wronski: second violin.
Stefan Kamasa: alto.
Aleksander Ciechanski: cello.
Since 1963 the group has undertaken many rounds in the United States and in the whole world. Most of its musicians have played twenty-four years together.
Lebenslauf von Wladyslaw Szpilman
Wladyslaw Szpilman ist am 5.12.1911 in Sosnowiec geboren.
Er studierte Musik an der Warschauer Chopin-Hochschule für Musik, bei Jøzef Smidowicz und Aleksander Michalowski (beide Schüler von Franz Liszt), und später (1931-1933) an der Akademie der Künste in Berlin, bei Leonid Kreutzer und Arthur Schnabel (Klavier) und Franz Schreker (Komposition).
In dieser Zeit komponierte er seine ersten symphonischen Werke: ein Violinkonzert, die Klavier-Suite "Zycie Maszyn"(Das Leben der Maschinen) und ein Concertino für Klavier und Orchester.
Nach Hitlers Machtübernahme ging er nach Warschau, wo er sofort Anerkennung als Pianist und Komponist sowohl ernster wie auch Unterhaltungsmusik erfahren konnte.
Seit 1935 war Wladyslaw Szpilman als festangestellter Pianist beim Polnischen Rundfunk tätig.
Am 23. September 1939, während der Belagerung Warschaus, spielte er dort ein Chopin-Recital. Eine halbe Stunde später wurde das Funkhaus zerstört. Mit dem selben Chopin-Recital konnte Wladylaw Szpilman dann, 1945, den Sendebetrieb des neuaufgebauten Rundfunks wiedereröffnen.
Nach 1945 trat er mit dem weltberühmten Geiger Bronislaw Gimpel, mit Henryk Szeryng, Ida Händel, Tadeusz Wronski und Roman Totenberg auf.
In jener Zeit schuf er mehrere symphonische Werke und zugleich etwa 300 Schlager, komponierte Kinderlieder, Hörspiel- und Filmmusiken.
Bis 1963 wirkte er als Chef der Musikabteilung des Polnischen Rundfunks.
Zu dieser Zeit gründet er das "Warschauer Klavierquintett", mit dem er bis 1986 weltweit konzertierte.
Im März 1998 : Veröfentlichung des Buches :"Das wunderbare Überleben" bei Econ Verlag - München.
Wladyslaw Szpilman ist am 6.7.2000 in Warschau verstorben.