Ballet Scene

It appears difficult, indeed impossible, to find a clear place for Wladyslaw Szpilman, the person or his work, in the history of 20th century music. We can only come closer to him by refraining from attempts to categorise him. This is due on the one hand to his remarkable biography: the severity and intensity of the emotional shocks and deprivations that shaped Szpilman, a survivor of the holocaust, exceed anything we would be capable of understanding. On the other hand, the musical language reflects the stylistic diversity and undogmatic attitude of the time in which his development as a young man was completed: the late '20s and early '30s of the last century. It is a language that plays with ambiguity, with masks hiding things that were perhaps too much to expect oneself or the sounds to express. Wladyslaw Szpilman - who was known for a long time outside Poland only as a pianist - was more than a musician, being rather a musicmaker in the emphatic sense of the word. Composing was just one aspect of his diverse work, and doubtless the least known, if we ignore the popularity of his songs.