The Pianist

The "Palme d’Or" , three "Oscars" and various European film prizes were among the awards collected by "The Pianist", Roman Polanski’s film based upon Wladyslaw Szpilman’s memoirs, 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.

Wladyslaw Szpilman was born in the Polish town of Sosnowiec on 5 December 1911. After first piano lessons he continued his musical studies in Berlin with Leonid Kreutzer, Arthur Schnabel (piano) and Franz Schreker (composition). A Pole of Jewish descent, he returned to Warsaw after Hitler’s seizure of power and soon won himself renown as a pianist and composer. From 1935 he worked for the Polish Broadcasting Company until his career came to an abrupt end in September 1939 when German troops invaded Poland.

After the end of war, Szpilman returned to the Polish Broadcasting Company where he directed the music department until 1963. He was also the chamber music partner of first-rate violinists, such as Henryk Szeryng and Bronislaw Gimpel, with whom he founded the Warsaw Piano Quintet. Szpilman performed as a concert pianist and chamber musician in Poland, as well as throughout Europe, Asia and America.

From his early Berlin years Szpilman never gave up the will to write music, even when living in the Warsaw Ghetto. His compositions include orchestral works, concertos, piano pieces, but also lots of music for radio plays and films, as well as around 500 songs, many of which still are popular in Poland today. His works are now published for the first time in printed editions by Boosey & Hawkes · Bote & Bock.

Wladyslaw Szpilman died on 6 July 2000 in Warsaw.

'The Pianist,' Wladyslaw Szpilman's remarkable memoir of his survival in Warsaw between the years 1939 and 1945, is a significant contribution to the literature of remembrance, a document of lasting historical and human value. Unforgivably overlooked since its publication (in Polish) in 1946 and translated into English just now for the first time, the book is a relative rarity: an account of the Holocaust written in the immediate aftermath of the experience itself. It has all the rawness and specificity of horrors painfully and uncomprehendingly withstood and afterward just as uncomprehendingly --but necessarily-- recorded. Writing this book would seem to have been a further act of survival by a man who performed more of them in six years than most human beings do in a lifetime. At the center of this book is of the largest hows in all of human inquiry: how one people set about systematically and relentlessly annihilating another. It is a how that Szpilman tells with clarity, intelligence, candor, courage. It is the how that must be told again and again and again.

There are many ways to read a book about the Holocaust, and one of them, surely, inevitably, is to try to answer the unanswerable: What makes one man endure when so many others succumb? We can only learn from those who testify; the others of course are mute. From Szpilman's testimony we learn this: It is an ineffable and wholly unpredictable mixture of fate, determination, accident, instinct. To know Wladyslaw Szpilman is, in the most hopeless of contexts, to know a modicum of hope. L.A.Times Sunday Book Review, December 5, 1999

Three personal favourites just make it into this category. In a year of glorious books, the one which made the deepest impression on me was the shortest, Wladyslaw Szpilman's The Pianist (Phoenix), which tells how, hidden in an attic, he survived the destruction of the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw. It is republished together with the diary of Wilm Hosenfeld, the German officer who saved his life. Szpilman's memoir haunts the mind in tiny, searing cameos; a rich guest in a cafe asks the pianist to stop playing so that he can test the ring of his gold coins on a table; Szpilman's father, a violinist, bows to every German officer he can find, bemusing them with his smiling courtesy; pushed to one side as his family are hustled onto a death-truck, Szpilman hears the sound behind closed windows, "the twittering of caged birds in deadly peril". You'll cry - I did - but please read it. by MIRANDA SEYMOUR London, 28.11.1999

Son Aims to Preserve Szpilman's Legacy
Wed December 25, 2002

HOLLYWOOD (Variety) – By Phil Gallo
It's a fleeting scene in "The Pianist," a three-second take in which Wladyslaw Szpilman is seen seated at the piano, penciling in notation on a musical staff. He is doing what he had quite a reputation for doing, even before World War II: composing. Roman Polanksi's Dec. 27 release chronicles Szpilman's harrowing days in Poland eluding Nazis, concentrating on his prowess as an interpreter of Chopin, usually for Poland's national radio. It never mentions his career as a songwriter, penning ditties that would become standards in the country before World War II and for more than two decades afterward. Szpilman stopped recording in 1968 and wrote his last songs in 1973. He died in 2000 at the age of 88. His son, Andrzej, has made it his mission to see that his father's music survives. He plans to introduce the elder Szpilman's work to Western audiences, starting with a new recording of his father's songs with English-language lyrics. He held an audition to find a singer and, after trying out about 30 vocalists, settled on Canada's Wendy Lands; lyricists were commissioned to put the elder Szpilman's works into the new language. The result is the obviously titled "Wendy Lands Sings the Music of the Pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman." Universal's Hip-O Records came on board after Andrzej Szpilman had completed four of the tunes with Lands and producer John Leftwich. Although the album was released Nov. 26, the promotional push is being tied to the release of "The Pianist" film. (Sony's soundtrack album also was released Nov. 26.) Few scripted films about real musicians have spawned non-soundtrack albums - Robert Altman's "Kansas City" comes to mind -- which makes this venture unusual. Szpilman has grown concerned that since the fall of communism in Europe, the music publishing of the Eastern world never made the transition to the West the way classical music did. His father's classical music was performed in the U.S., and Szpilman toured the States beginning in the 1960s with the Warsaw Piano Quintet, but his 500 songs, 150 of which made their way onto Poland's pop charts, were unknown outside his home country. "My father's work was up to the work of Western composers, and the best way to get my father's music to Western (audiences) was through proper recordings with English lyrics," says Szpilman, who has been musical director for a rock group, a record producer and a dentist. "The Polish lyrics were too specific to Poland to translate." Szpilman pere often collaborated with Poland's leading poets, one of whom was his brother Henryk; his music was a favorite of Polish jazz musicians and several tunes were recorded 50 times or more, the younger Szpilman says. The new album is a thoroughly modern-sounding disc, akin to the work of Norah Jones or Rickie Lee Jones. Szpilman, a fan of Cole Porter, Duke Ellington and Burt Bacharach, drew on Western influences when writing pop music. "We were taken by the intimate nature of the album," says Hip-O VP Pat Lawrence, who brought the project to the label. Tracks from the album are being serviced to radio, though there is no specific single. The CD will be part of radio station giveaways associated with the screening of the film, and Lands will likely do showcase gigs in L.A. and New York, possibly touring if sales are strong enough. Lands, from Montreal, had a hit in Canada with "Can't Hold On," and over the last couple of years has landed tunes in TV shows ("Felicity," "Family Law") despite not having a domestic deal. Songs on the album were wholly revamped lyrically but unchanged musically. "I Wish You'd Ask to Dance With Me" was a hit in 1936 as "I Didn't Expect Your Tears"; "Fall in Love Again" was written in the Warsaw ghetto in 1940 as "Wherever You Are, Come Back"; and "My Memories of You" began life in 1948 as "Silent Night." Boosey & Hawkes will publish a songbook associated with the album, and a documentary on the pianist's life is being readied for U.S. television in 2004. "In just a few months," Szpilman says of the retelling of his father's story, "we'll cover an entire life that he never talked about."

Photo jens.wunderlich@t-online.de

Army Archered - senior columnist, Just for Variety, on 20.2.2003

GOOD MORNING:

"THE PIANIST'S" ( WLADYSLAW SZPILMAN'S) music lives on -- with lyrics in English. I spoke with his son Andrzej (46) by phone from Germany where he is readying the publication of his father's songbook in three weeks. He had written more than 500 songs -- some of which Andrzej says he discovered written "on little bits of paper in coffee bars." Wladyslaw died July 6, 2000, when Roman Polanski was preparing to film "The Pianist." The songbook, published by Boosey and Hawkes will include English lyrics by Larry John McNally, David Batteau and Arthur Schlosser and Oscar-nominated (theme from "Rocky") Carol Connors. Her songs are titled, "Handle With Care" and "Lost Inside My Dream." Connors has something in common with the Szpilman family -- her Polish grandmother's entire family was murdered in Treblinka. Carol met with Andrzej in Hollywood last month and he returns in March to discuss names to record his father's songs with the English lyrics. I asked Andrzej his opinion of the film. "I am very grateful to Roman Polanski. It (the film) is a monument to all victims of the holocaust." As for his opinion on Adrien Brody, who portrays his father, "It was a great performance of a character so familiar to me. He was warm, great and I was very moved by him." Andrzej was present during the filming, his 10-year-old son played a role. He says Polanski avoided any personal publicity -- did not even have photographers around during his pre-filming meetings with Wladyslaw …

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.

MARTIN ANDERSON

Wladyslaw Szpilman, pianist and composer, born 5.December.1911, Sosnowiec, Poland; married Halina Grzecznarowski, 2 sons; died Warsaw, 6 July 2000.

has been Wladyslaw Szpilman's ''The Pianist,'' an account of his survival in and out of the Warsaw Ghetto that Szpilman wrote more than 50 years ago. The book was swiftly suppressed, but Szpilman's son discovered it and arranged for its international publication over the last few years. Szpilman lost his entire family, but he was repeatedly saved by others, particularly by other Polish musicians and music lovers who were not Jews; he also survived because of his own resourcefulness and resilience. One of the most dramatic episodes in the book comes when a Nazi officer spares Szpilman's life after the pianist plays a Chopin nocturne for him.

THE GUARDIAN

Books of the year

For someone who consumes history on TV, Jeffrey Shandler's While America Watches was illuminating and complemented Peter Novick's provocative essay The Holocaust in American Life. Wladyslaw Szpilman's memoir of life and death in the Warsaw Ghetto, The Pianist, is a miniature masterpiece to set alongside Victor Klemperer's nightmare epic To the Bitter End, his diary of existence in Dresden 1942-45. I appreciated Suzanne Glass's thoughtful first novel, The Interpreter, and I am enjoying Gotham , by Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace, a wonderful romp through New York's history. December 3, 1999 by David Cesarani

The Economist

Our reviewers' favourites

Our correspondents choose what they consider the finest of those published this year

THE PIANIST: SURVIVING THE HORROR OF WARSAW, 1939-45 By Wladyslaw Szpilman , Picador;

The last live broadcast on Polish radio in 1939, a piano piece played by Wladyslaw Szpilman, was interrupted by German shelling. The same pianist played the same piece when broadcasting resumed six years later. Mr Szpilman's account of the years in between is a tribute to the power of description and of music.

LIBRARY JOURNAL

Best Books of 1999

Since its inception in 1985, LJ's Best Books list has aimed to provide an end-of-the-year overview of the most interesting and important books the year had to offer. The list has averaged 30 to 35 titles, but this year -- as befits the end of the millennium -- it totals a grand 55. The Book Review editors found a wide range of books they were eager to share and noted some intriguing pairings: John Keegan's and Niall Ferguson's divergent studies of World War II, for instance, and novels by relative newcomers Diane Leslie and Frederick Reuss that look at the world from a child's cockeyed yet haunted perspective. With the rest of the list, these books represent a treat for every dedicated reader.

Szpilman, Wladyslaw. The Pianist: The Extraordinary True Story of One Man's Survival in Warsaw, 1939-1945. Picador: St. Martin's. ISBN 0-312-24415-0. $23.

Szpilman's memoir of life in the Warsaw ghetto is remarkable not only for the heroism of its protagonists but for the author's lack of bitterness, even optimism, in recounting the events. Written and published in a short run in Poland soon after the war, this first translation maintains a freshness of experience lacking in many later, more ruminative Holocaust memoirs. by Eric Bryant, Barbara Hoffert, Rebecca Miller, Nathan Ward, & Wilda Williams January 1, 2000

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

"The Pianist" is remarkable for several reasons. First, as an eyewitness account of the destruction of the Jewish community in Warsaw, Szpilman's memoir is historically indispensable. Second, he writes with the grace and economy of a poet; there are no false notes. And third, his story is so incredible that it must be read to be believed... ...Here, in Wladyslaw Szpilman's "The Pianist," is a clear voice from a world that has vanished. We are fortunate to have him as a witness. THE WASHINGTON POST, 18.11.1999 (Read more)

The book is filled with unforgettable incidents, images and people. Its power derives from its immediacy but also from the deep reserves of culture the author was able to summon so soon after the war in an effort to make sense of it. Thanks to a new translation, American readers can now sample his artistry for themselves. THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, 2.9.1999 (Read more)

How a musician spent his six years between performances. Even by the standards set by Holocaust memoirs, this book is a stunner... SEATTLE WEEKLY, 7.10.1999 (Read more)

A Pianist´s War Notes: Wladyslaw Szpilman´s "The Pianist" chronicles the authors life from 1939 to 1945 in a matter-of-fact prose that is almost startling in its mundane telling of the horrific, terrifying events of Warld War II. FOX NEWS ONLINE, 15.10.1999 (Read more)

A stunning tribute to what one human being can endure, "The Pianist" is even more - a testimony to the redemptive power of fellow feeling. CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER, 4.10.1999 (Read more)

''The Pianist'' is the diary of a season in hell... ...is a great book... ...It is easy to understand why the authorities suppressed ''The Pianist...'' THE BOSTON GLOBE, 21.9.1999 (Read more)

...this book will make readers look again at a history they thought they knew... PUBLISHER´S WEEKLY, Sept.99 (Read more)

With marked clarity and detachment, Szpilman takes us through the changing moods among the doomed population, moods determined by the merest whim or close calculations of the Germans. This is also a book about the power of music, which provides Szpilman the determination to go on and literally saves him several times. Several things distinguish this among Holocaust memoirs.Kirkus Review, Aug. 1999 (Read more)

"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)

The last nocturne reprised by David Pryce-Jones THE TIMES LITERARY SUPLEMENT, 23/4/99 No 5012 (Read more)

The Pianist, Wladyslaw Szpilman's memoir of his existence in Warsaw from 1939 to 1945, is a book so fresh and vivid, so heartbreaking, and so simply and beautifully written, that it manages to tell us the story of horrendous events as if for the first time. Sunday Telegraph 17.4.1999 (Read more)

"The Pianist is a work of a very high order in the literature of the Holocaust. Despite everything that happened to Szpilman - the loss of his family and most of his friends - it doesn´t contain even a hint of a desire for revenge..." (Peter Gilbert)Ham & High 9/4/99 (Read more)

..."the immediacy of Szpilman's account goes hand in hand with a rare tone of innocence." (Lisa Appignanesi) OBSERVER, 28/3/99 (Read more)

They didn´t shoot the piano player - Interview with Wladyslaw Szpilman by Jay Rayner OBSERVER, 21/3/99 (Read more)

Karen Glaser meets an extraordinary soloist: the pianist whose vivid memoir of survival in wartime Warsaw is available in English after 50 years. JEWISH CHRONICLE, 19/03/99 (Read more)

...it is all told with a simple clarity that lodges the story in one's stomach through a mixture of disgust, terror, despair, rage and guilt that grips the reader almost gently." THE SPECTATOR, 5/3/99 (Read more)

"The images drawn are unusually sharp and clear, perhaps because this book was first written immediately after the war. But its moral tone is even more striking: Szpilman refuses to make a hero or a demon out of anyone." THE LITERARY REVIEW, 3/99

From the Abyss (Read more) by Rafael Scharf (Book Launch - Jewish Book Week London 14.3.99)

"Music tells Holocaust survivor's harrowing tale. Chopin's Nocturne in C Sharp minor played a major role in Wladyslaw Szpilman's life." THE PRESS, Christchurch, New Zealand 8/98 (Read more)

The Pianist book is a vivid look at occupied Poland Author's son worked years to get it published

I heard the name of the pianist, Wladyslaw Szpilman, from my father, a Warsaw musician of Szpilman's generation who must certainly have heard his music and met him after the war. So, when I saw that his book, "The Pianist: The extraordinary true story of one man's survival in Warsaw, 1939-1945," came with a CD, I picked it up also because of its family musical connection. Yes, I listened to the music with much pleasure (it's a shame the particulars of the works are printed only on the CD itself); Szpilman was indeed an exciting pianist. On the CD accompanying the book, he plays Busoni's transcription of Bach's Chaconne, and Chopin, lots of Chopin - the mazurka, opus 17, no. 4, which my father often played, and the nocturne in C sharp minor...

... The book and his story are a rare document, with a human significance that goes way beyond the boundaries of the period with which it deals, 1939-1945, or the place in which it all happened, Warsaw.
From the article by Ayelet Negev in Yedioth Ahronot, in which she interviews Szpilman's son, Andrzej, I learned that Yad Vashem refuses to recognize Hosenfeld, the German officer who saved Szpilman, as one of "the righteous among the nations," fearing he may have participated in the murder of Jews and despite solid evidence that he, in fact, saved a number.
As a result, the hope expressed by Biermann, that Szpilman and his son would plant a tree in the name of Hosenfeld along the avenue of The Righteous Among the Nations at the Holocaust memorial site cannot be realized.

…A book that should be featured in the top 10 books to read!…

…This was one of the most thought provoking books I have ever read….

…Wladyslaw Szpilman's memoir 'The pianist' is spell binding. It was hard to put the book down, once I started reading it. I have already read it 3 times… …his book is a must read…

…this book will move you to tears…

…Truly, truly an unforgettable masterpiece...

L’extraordinaire destin d’un musicien juif dans le ghetto de varsovie, 1939-1945

Le Pianiste a été élu Meilleur livre de l'année 2001 par la rédaction du magazine Lire

"Ce sont les mémoires, presque un journal, d'un pianiste polonais qui a vécu le ghetto de Varsovie et la destruction de la capitale. Il a aujourd'hui près de 90 ans et vit à Varsovie. Ce livre, écrit juste après la guerre, a été publié en Pologne à l'époque. Il évoque des faits historiques que le régime communiste préférait oublier et il n'a jamais été republié. Il y a un an, le fils de Wladyslaw Szpilman, qui vit en Allemagne, a découvert ce texte. Il n'en avait jamais discuté avec son père. On ne revenait pas sur ça. Pendant très longtemps, moi aussi, je parlais peu, voire pas du tout, de cette période. Le livre a donc été publié en Allemagne, et il a eu un énorme succès, public et critique. Il a tout de suite été repris par les Anglais et, il y a quelques mois, il a été édité aux États-Unis. En France, il sortira chez Laffont en décembre. Ce livre se lit comme un vrai thriller et, bien qu'il retrace une période noire de l'histoire, il est plein de forces positives et d'optimisme."

Polish Radio published the 5 CD´s box with recordigs of Wladyslaw Szpilman. Click on this link for more informations in Polish

Polish National Philharmonic / A. Wit, National Philharmonic Hall, Warsaw, Poland
The Polish pianist
Warsaw is in the grip of a mania – Szpilmania, to be precise. The face of Wladyslaw Szpilman stares out at you from bus stops. The papers are full of Szpilman articles. His family seem to be permanent fixtures on radio and TV. The excitement has been caused by Roman Polanski's film The Pianist, winner of the Palme d'Or at the Cannes film festival in February and released this month in Poland (it opens in Britain later this year). It's based on Szpilman's gripping account of his survival of the Warsaw ghetto and his brushes with death in the bombed-out city. The book had made the bestseller lists by the time Szpilman died, aged 88, in 2000; Polanski survived the Krakow ghetto, and Szpilman's tale spoke directly to him.
This concert of Szpilman's compositions, which capped celebrations of the composer, illustrated the duality of his musical life. Having studied the piano with Schnabel and composition with Schreker, Szpilman was one of Poland's foremost classical pianists, spending 50 years on the concert platform, but for the harrowing interruption of his incarceration and flight. And yet his musical legacy is largely of lighter music: he composed some 450 popular songs, a selection of which, sung by Irena Santor, formed the second half of the concert.
The first half consisted of a bustling, neo-Classical Little Overture, the introduction from his score to the film Calls to My Wife, with soaring string melodies à la Mantovani, a Concertino for piano and orchestra, a Ballet Scene and an ironically sentimental Waltz in the Old Style – the sum total of his orchestral output.
The Concertino was written in 1940, in the teeth of the Nazi terror. But the bright and buoyant music betrays nothing of its origins: its blend of classical format and jazzy melodic inflection is Gershwin in the ghetto, the debt to the Rhapsody in Blue obvious.
A suite for solo piano from 1933, The Life of Machines, with pounding Bartokian figures in its first movement, a wistful central section, and sardonic, Prokofievan toccata-finale, preceded the Ballet Scene of 1948, a mix of more Gershwin and the Prokofiev of the Scythian Suite, with a soupçon of The Rite of Spring – stomping rhythms obscuring a sense of humour that popped its head up when allowed.
Wladyslaw Szpilman will become a household name when Polanski's film is released internationally. So it's a pity he wrote so little for his instrument. Still, the fetching melodies of those hundreds of songs have endeared themselves to the Poles, and we'll doubtless be hearing a lot of them over here, too.
Independent on 26.09.2002 Review by Martin Anderson

Berlin, 20 May 2001

World Premiere of the Piano-Suite "The Life of the Machines" (1932) by Wladyslaw SzpilmanPerformed by Guenter Herzfeld

Curt-Sachs-Hall Berlin Philharmony House

On April 29th, 2001 Peter Gimpel, Founder and Curator of the "Jakob and Bronislaw Gimpel Archives" writes:

"I am happy to give you the original manuscript of your father´s Suita for Piano, (a personal copy 1934 -as) inscribed by your father, Wladyslaw Szpilman to my father, Jakob Gimpel... I feel very privileged to have been able to contribute to the preservation of your father´s memory and work".

Los Angeles Times

Musically Mixed 'Reflections' on Holocaust

The Holocaust has become one of the most frequently invoked catalysts for composition in the 20th century--and now, beyond. It is also one of the most problematic. The risk of not doing justice to an event of such unbelievable horror must weigh like a heavy stone upon a composer's mind.And it is a loaded subject for the reviewer. No one questions the sincerity and commitment of the composers and performers, but sometimes you have to separate the subject matter from what your ears are telling you.Those challenges were present in the "Remembrances: Reflections on the Holocaust" program from conductor Noreen Green and the Los Angeles Jewish Symphony at Encino's Valley Beth Shalom on Sunday night--laudably ambitious in scope, serious in tone......The most memorable work was not a Holocaust piece per se. Rather, it was a Piano Concertino by Wladyslaw Szpilman (1911-2000), written in the Warsaw Getto in 1940 but never performed until Sunday night, with a remarkable 16-year-old pianist, Arthur Abadi, doing solo honors. Playing on a catchy four-note motif, the piece sounds like a European reaching across the sea to a fellow Jewish composer, George Gershwin, with bluesy, rhapsodic flourishes capped by a jazzy final chord... L.A.Times, May 1, 2001 By RICHARD S. GINELL

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	..." A not to be taken lightly album " - Bilboard, 23. Nov. 2002
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	..."elegant and beautiful"
	..." thoroughly modern-sounding disc " - Variety, 23.12.2002
	..."This CD is testament to the power of music..." - The Holywood Reporter, 7. 03.2003
	..."saddles up with two Joneses, Norah and Rickie Lee .. " - Variety, 14.03.2003
	..."marvelously uplifting quality. " - Los Angeles Times, 14.03.2003
	..."amazingly cool..." - The Holywood Reporter, 14. 03.2003