Wladyslaw Szpilman - plays Sergei Rachmaninovs "Rhapsody on a theme by Paganini"

Warsaw National Philharmonic Orchestra Dir. Witold Rowicki

Live Recording Warsaw/Poland 1956

More pictures in the photo gallery

Playing at survival in Warsaw

 by Anne Applebaum Evening Standard 14 May 1999

He lives in a neat, narrow house with a small, well-kept garden. Inside his sitting room there are shelves of old books, a Bieder-meier secretaire, a polished parquet floor. Black and white photographs of old friends stand in rows on the piano; prints and framed mementoes hang from the white walls. At first glance, everything about Wladyslaw Szpilman speaks of a certain kind of Central European comfort, of a pleasantly uneventful, bourgeois life. Dressed in a tweed jacket and tie, speaking of popular music and songs, Szpilman himself initially gives off the air of someone who has lived all of his 87 years in civilised surroundings. Then, effortlessly, he moves from the familiar to the horrific.

"I looked like a wild man," he recalls. "I was dirty, unshaven, my hair was long. The German found me when I was in the ruins of someone's kitchen, looking for food. I found out later - this isn't in the book - that he was looking for toothpaste, but no matter. When he saw me, he asked me what on earth was I doing there ... What could I say? I couldn't say that I was Jewish, that I was hiding, that I had been in these ruins for months. I told him that this was my old flat, that I had come back to see what was left ..."

So begins Szpilman's account of how, in the final weeks of the Second World War, having escaped the Warsaw Getto and survived months of hiding, he was rescued by a German: CaptainWilm Hosenfeld discovered him, ascertained that he was a pianist - to convince him, Szpilman played Chopin's Nocturne in C sharp minor on a battered, out-of-tune piano - and without much further ado found him a better hiding place. "He noticed something I had not seen: that just beneath the roof there was a tiny attic ..." Together, they made sure Szpilman could climb into it, and pull up the ladder afterwards.

Over the subsequent weeks, the German officer regularly brought bread to the Jewish musician, and news from the Front. Finally, in December 1944, he left him with the words: "The war will be over by spring at the latest." As Szpilman tells it now, the story sounds like a coincidence, a once-in-a-life-time piece of luck. In fact, it is merely one episode in an extraordinary story of survival, recently published in English as The Pianist. Wladyslaw Szpilman, already a famous musician and composer when the war broke out - Poles of a certain generation still know the words to his popular songs - was rescued not only by a German but by a Jewish policeman, who pulled him out of a queue of people boarding trains for Treblinka; by his talent, which kept him alive in the starving Warsaw Ghetto; and by, in his own estimate, no less than 20 Poles who smuggled him out of the Ghetto and then hid him in their flats, knowing that they and their families could be sentenced to death for helping a Jew.

In the end he survived for several months alone, perhaps the only person alive in the burnedout ruins of Warsaw, drinking water frozen in the bathtubs of empty flats and eating whatever he could find hidden in destroyed kitchens. Written in flat, almost emotionless prose, The Pianist evokes the strange mix of horror and elation Szpilman must have felt at that time. His whole family was dead, his city was in ruins, and yet, against all possible odds, he remained alive. Both the book, and the man himself, are also devoid of any desire for vengeance.

There is no finger-pointing in The Pianist, no hatred. Along with his straightforward portrait of Captain Hosenfeld, he depicts good Jews and bad Jews, Poles who helped him and Poles who cheated him. Ideology, nationality and religion, he says now, had nothing to do with anyone's wartime behaviour: "One of the Poles who helped me first told me, 'I was an anti-Semite, but not any more.' Then he went on to risk his life by hiding me."

Although it has only now appeared in English, Szpilman first wrote his wartime memoir in 1945. In that post-war era, it appeared in poor quality bindings, on bad paper, and in a very small print run, which nevertheless sold out immediately. After that, the story was forgotten, or rather ignored. In Poland, it was never reprinted: within a few years of the war's end, Poland's communist authorities had grown touchier about the publication of a book which had a German hero, and which also contained flattering descriptions of the Polish Home Army, the wartime, anti-communist Polish underground.

Szpilman tried once or twice to have the book republished, but didn't push. He was more interested in his music, didn't consider himself a writer, and most of all had no interest in politics of any kind. "Three times they asked me to join the Communist Party, but I always said no," he says now.

Only the efforts of his son Andrzej, who lives in Germany, ensured that the book was published there two years ago, where it became a best seller, and now in Britain.

But even during its years out of print, Szpilman's story did have some unexpected effects. Among other things, it led him, through a series of chance meetings, to Frau Hosenfeld, the wife of his good German. She wrote to him in 1950, when her husband was dying in a Soviet prison camp, asking for help. Szpilman did what he could.

"I went," he says grimly, "to see Jakub Berman."

Berman was the head of the Polish secret police, and, in Szpilman's words, a criminal whom no decent person in Poland would speak to. Being a celebrity himself, Szpilman simply rang up Berman's office and said he wanted to meet him on a private matter. They met, Berman listened. Nothing came of it. Captain Hosenfeld died in his Soviet prison camp, having been tortured for claiming to have saved a Jew.

And not just one: over the years, it has emerged that Captain Hosenfeld served as guardian angel for a whole group of people, including others Jews, as well as a Polish priest. His son has been to visit Szpilman: the two of them went together to the building, now rebuilt, where the Wehrmacht officer brought bread to the Jew in hiding. Standing there on the street, the younger Hosenfeld had what Szpilman can only describe as "an attack of hysteria".

Szpilman himself does not appear prone to such violent emotions. He says he is often asked how he can bear to go on living in a country in which he saw so many people die, but he says that most of the time it doesn't bother him. Polish is his language, Poland is where he was born - "my son says there was a Szpilman here in the 15th century" - and Poland is where his music was popular, even adored.

True, he has never been to Treblinka, where his entire family died: they were on the train that he escaped. "To the end of my life," he says flatly,

"I will never forgive myself that I was unable to do anything to save them." But he has always lived in Warsaw - some of his best-loved songs are dedicated to the rebuilding of the city - despite, or perhaps because of, the things he saw there. And he does appear i n s e p a r a b l e from Warsaw, and from a certain old-fashioned aspect of the city's culture: he easily r e m i n i s c e s about Warsaw café society of the 1960s and1970s, shakes his head at today's popular music - " I can ' t understand any of the words" - and is looking forward, next year, to his fiftieth w e d d i n g anniversary. His wife, a doctor of 70 who appears no older than50, smiles graciously as she pours tea into English china cups. The horror and the terror are there, in the background, but they don't show on the surface.

Or not always. After the war, Szpilman gave occasional piano recitals at 8 Narbutta Street, in a building in central Warsaw which he helped to construct as part of a slave labour gang from the Getto. Most of the Jewish brigade who worked there were shot, once the construction had been finished, if they hadn't died already. At the end of The Pianist, Szpilman describes his feelings about returning, once again, to that terrible place:

"The building still stands, and there is a school in it now. I played to Polish children who do not know how much human suffering and mortal fear once passed through their sunny schoolroom.

"I pray they may never learn what such fear and suffering are."

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 Independent, 14 August 2000

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

Grave: Powazki, Aleja Zasluzonych, ul.Powazkowska 43, 01-797 Warsaw - Poland
A 3 Aleja - 3 - 14

Photo jens.wunderlich@t-online.de 

Jewish Journal Los Angeles

2003-01-17


Memory Through Music

Wladyslaw Szpilman’s jazzier tunes have made their way onto a new CD, thanks to his son, Andrzej.

by Naomi Pfefferman, Arts & Entertainment Editor


When Andrzej Szpilman was 12, he furtively rummaged through a chest high on a shelf of a closed wardrobe in his Warsaw home. Inside the closet, he found 10 copies of a book and, recognizing his father as the author, hid one in his third-story bedroom. “I read it and received a shock,” said Andrzej Szpilman, 46, a dentist and record producer who immigrated to Germany in 1983.

The book was “Death of a City,” his father, Wladyslaw’s, grittily brutal, dispassionate 1946 memoir of hiding in and around the Warsaw Ghetto. Since Roman Polanski turned the book into a searing film, “The Pianist” — which won four National Society of Film Critics Awards and is up for two Golden Globes on Sunday — Szpilman has become one of the best-known Holocaust survivors in history.

But on that fateful 1968 day, his dramatic story was news to his son. “He had never once spoken of his experience,” Andrzej Szpilman said. “He never even told me he was Jewish. I think it hurt him to talk about it, because he survived and all his family perished.”

More than three decades after he discovered “The Pianist” hidden in a wardrobe, Andrzej Szpilman has made it his mission to bring his father’s life story out of the closet, literally. In 1999, he spearheaded the reissue of the memoir, which had been banned by the communist regime and ultimately captivated Polanski. When Polanski’s screenplay depicted his father only as a virtuoso pianist, he produced CDs highlighting his father’s work as a classical composer and the author of more than 500 pop songs.

The latest, “Wendy Lands Sings the Music of The Pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman,” recently released by Universal’s Hip-O Records, is a well-received collection of jazzy ditties Szpilman (1911-2000) wrote from the 1930s to the 1960s. “In the film, we see [Poles] helping my father because they knew his Chopin performances, but the real reason most people knew him and hid him was from his hit songs,” his son said. “He owes his survival to this kind of music.”

In April, with his friend, Sherman Heinig, a German music industry veteran based in Los Angeles, Andrzej Szpilman brought in producer/arranger John Leftwich, who had worked with Rickie Lee Jones. Together, they hired writers to create new, English-language lyrics and auditioned about 30 singers before selecting Canadian-born chanteuse Wendy Lands. The venture is unusual because few scripted films have been able to generate nonsoundtrack albums, according to Variety.

Andrzej Szpilman said he initially invested his own money in the project because his father, while famous in Poland, never had the chance to promote his work in the West. “His career was essentially [stunted] by the Nazis and then the communists,” he said. “But it was painful for me that people thought of his music as only good enough for the Polish market. It’s my ambition to make it popular to a worldwide audience. That’s one way I can honor his memory.”

When Andrzej Szpilman began working on reissuing “The Pianist,” he said his father, then in his late 80s, wasn’t interested in the slightest. “He said, ‘Do whatever you want, but no one will read it,’” his son recalled. Instead, the book became a critically acclaimed bestseller published in 20 languages.

Wladyslaw Szpilman did agree to help publicize the memoir by appearing at book signings and speaking to readers, the first time his son ever heard him talk about the war. “But it was strange,” he said. “He hadn’t read the book in 50 years — in fact he never re-read it — but when he spoke he used the exact same sentences he’d written in ‘46. Like the book, his tone was detached. He sounded like a computer.”

Nevertheless, the elder Szpilman was pleased when the book drew Polanski’s attention and that of Dr. Noreen Green, artistic director of the Los Angeles Jewish Symphony, who conducted the 2001 world premiere of a piece mentioned in the memoir. In the book, Szpilman describes a Gershwinesque “Concertino for Piano and Orchestra” he wrote while languishing in the Warsaw Ghetto. “What struck me was the discrepancy between the wonderful, optimistic music and the terrible conditions under which it was written,” Green said.

Andrzej Szpilman — who included the piece on a CD, “Music Inspired by the Motion Picture ‘The Pianist’” — believes the breezy “Concertino” provides clues to his late father’s psychology. So do the upbeat songs, featured on the Lands disc, Szpilman wrote during the Holocaust and the communist regime’s anti-Semitic purge of 1968. “My father didn’t like to talk about these things, but writing music was his way of coping,” his son said.

Available from SONY CLASSICAL

Wladyslaw Szpilman: Original recordings of the pianist

W. Szpilman plays works of Szpilman, Bach, Rachmaninow, Chopin a.o.

amazon.com

'The Pianist' sounds off
Technical problems sink screening of Polanski pic

It's probably just as well that director Roman Polanski didn't attend Wednesday's L.A.benefit preem of "The Pianist" at the Loews Cineplex Century Plaza: The sound system in the main theater broke and the audience never saw the film.
For the first few minutes of the screening, many in the crowd thought the audio problems were the director's artistic choice. The 2002 Cannes Palme d'Or winner begins with the Nazis' WWII assault on Warsaw, and it was possible to imagine that the actors' muted voices -- as opposed to the bombing that was heard clearly -- might indicate deafness caused by explosions.
'Dolby guy' dilemma
However, it quickly became apparent that something was wrong with the speakers and the projection stopped. An announcement was made that "the film is being rethreaded and the Dolby guy is here."
The audience milled around for 45 minutes -- "I told him to make a silent film," was one wit's comment -- before Focus co-prexy David Linde came out and said, "The guys can't figure out what's wrong with the machinery, except it doesn't work."
Andrzej Szpilman, who is the son of the main character, said that because "The Pianist" is a film where the tone of the musical score is so crucial, Polanski had come to the Warsaw preem three days early for sound checks. He described the director as a perfectionist.
"I'm afraid to think what he would say," said Szpilman, regarding the sound problems. "His language is very
powerful, especially in Polish."
One small compensation arising from the film starting almost an hour late and the wait to see if the screening would resume: There was enough time to ready the Century Plaza's ballroom for the after-party. (A screening in a secondary theater with 150 guests went more smoothly.)
Most of the audience, which included star Adrien Brody, Jeff Berg, John Burnham, Martin Landau, Fran Drescher, Bruce Vilanch and Jack Nicholson with Lara Flynn Boyle, were at the affair that featured a 12-minute performance of a Gershwin-like Wladyslaw Szpilman concerto by the 40-piece L.A. Jewish Symphony.
Considering how many things went wrong, the crowd was in a surprisingly good mood. It certainly wasn't like being at the airport when a flight is canceled. The guests went right to the buffet, listened to the orchestra and then socialized.
A Focus rep said special screenings were being arranged so that the audience could see the film over the next two weeks.
Date in print: Fri., Dec. 6, 2002, Los Angeles

Wladyslaw Szpilman´s Planet

Num : 9973 Name : SZPILMAN Epoch of the osculating orbital elements (Modified Julian Date = Julian Date - 2400000.5) : 53400 Semi-major axis (AU) a : 2.5307511 "e" Eccentricity : 0.17139580 "i (deg)"Inclination (degrees, J2000 ecliptic) : 1.49867 "W (deg)" Longitude of the ascending node (degrees, J2000 ecliptic) : 104.48204 Node : 297.24751 "M (deg)" Mean anomoly (degrees) : 222.7616900 H : 14.20 G : 0.15 Ref : Minor Planet Center MPC40288 Discovery date : 1993 07 12
Discovery site : La Silla
Discoverer : Elst, E. W.

http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/et

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