Ministerstwo Kultury i Dziedzictwa Narodowego

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Composers

Eugeniusz Knapik

*1951

A Need to Reach Values ('Quarta', 4/2000)

QUARTA: Do you have a personal attitude towards the expression 'new romanticism', which has also been used in connection with your output?

EUGENIUSZ KNAPIK: I shall say, without embarking upon a discussion with those who try to describe what I am doing in one way or another, that I feel close to the world of the beginning of our century, which evidently continues the romanticism, but is no longer romanticism par excellence. As a result, I feel close to both Skriabin and Mahler and the French composers, and later also to Messiaen, who can hardly be called a romantic. I feel close to Ives' attitude. I think that if music is capable of conveying anything, it does so by means of emotions, which are the motor propelling the entire musical space. I am very pleased when my works are played non-romantically, without the manneristic interpretation, with a certain classical distance, one would like to say.

Also the way you treat time in your works is non-romantic. It is stretched, suspended in a moment, which produces a certain philosophical distance. In spite of the existence of emotions, they are somewhere beyond the screen of thoughtfulness.

Yes, and I should like it to be so, to be a kind of reflection, distance to what is most essential. This kind of narration draws me nearest to the attainment of the assumed goal.

Henryk Mikołaj Górecki was your professor of composition, your master. What are your memories of the period of your studies with him? Are you of the opinion, like Debussy, that, in order to form one's own musical language, a young composer must forget everything he was taught at the conservatory?

My five-year course of studies with Henryk Mikołaj Górecki was a very essential time for me. Also because we spent many hours together. I was lucky that Henryk devoted more time to me than the academic etiquette required. Often these were long hours spent while drinking tea and talking about various things. About compositional skills, too, but also about matters that seemed to have had nothing in common with the problems we ought to have discussed. I think that there are no direct references to Górecki's output in my works, whereas the musical world that I came to know with his help was the one that had great consequences in my later output. First Mahler, whom we have already mentioned, then Szymanowski, and Skriabin – his direct predecessor, and also Messiaen. If I were to point at the sources of my work I should rather point at these names and not directly at Henryk Mikołaj Górecki – my musical father. But it so happens that Górecki himself refers to these names. It is evident that, somewhere at a deeper level, this community exists.

A significant moment in your artistic career was entering into co-operation with Jan Fabre, who is perceived as a somewhat scandalising figure in the world of theatre, attacking certain found tastes and values, provocative.

I think that these opinions you are quoting are rather superficial. Once we get to know better what he is doing, it may be a little provocative, more acute, aimed at acting strongly upon the audience. Whereas in fact, somewhere in the background, he has the same need to reach values. I can say today that now that I know Jan' s works – both theatrical and artistic – and his texts, and, what is most important, I know him, the opinion you have given here does him harm. Our co-operation started in a very humdrum way. It was not I, but he who found me, because, as he says himself, he needed music that awoke emotions and was emotional. It was he who turned up at my place and this also proves that our worlds meet somewhere.

What did you gain by this co-operation; did it change anything?

It was an immense experience. I mean – becoming familiar with the world of opera, which I owe to Jan, because I could never bring myself to take up opera. And it is a world which must be fascinating if we are experiencing such an unusual renaissance of opera. I think that this shapes my compositional skills in a different way, this is obvious. I see it in this way that music is the foundation on which the opera is built. It is the music that determines everything and everything should be adjusted to it. The music must – with its importance – 'hold' the world presented later visually, in the form of staging, which should result from that music.

Do you plan big stage works in the near future, or chamber ones ?

I am yearning for chamber works, but my plans involve cantata-operatic ones. Work on the next opera – this time an independent one – is fairly advanced, and I am finishing a big-scale work, a kind of cantata: Symphonic Songs for voices and full symphony orchestra.

Interviewed by Ewa Cichoń

Eugeniusz Knapik's Tha' Munnot Waste No Time ('Quarta', 2001)

The work Tha' Munnot Waste No Time for two pianos (three in the original version) and clarinet ad libitum, was written in 1998 in response to a commission from the 'Warsaw Autumn' International Contemporary Music Festival. The first performance took place as part of the 1999 festival. Eugeniusz Knapik's words concerning his monumental cycle of songs Up into the Silence – that it is his 'personal, artistic farewell to the twentieth century' – might be applied with equal force to this work too, although this farewell is on a much smaller scale (but only as regards the scoring!).

Knapik' s piano and pianistic art have been described many a time. His performances of Messiaen's works (his legendary creations of Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant-Jésus!) or Skriabin's Sonatas are considered by experts as belonging to the most outstanding interpretations of twentieth-century works. And yet, Knapik has also given excellent performances of the music of the Classics and Romantics and made a number of unforgettable contributions in the field of chamber music – one might mention here Ives' Sonatas for violin and piano (with Aureli Błaszczok), or a whole series of piano quintets with the Silesian Quartet... It seems that Knapik understands and 'feels' the piano better than any other present-day composer. And he has never said that in the twentieth century 'it is not possible' to write for the piano. He does write! It is only a pity that today we hear him increasingly rarely in the role of a pianist – but this is another problem...

Tha' Munnot Waste No Time is, as has been said, a 'farewell', a 'farewell' to the piano music of the passing century: a retrospective glance at its highlights and ... meanderings. An echo of Messiaen's 'bird-like' figures and Ligeti's motor-rhythmic twelve-tone 'aggregations' can be heard here, as well as Skriabin-like ecstatic harmonic climaxes and Bartok-like rhythmic ostinatos; in a word: very likely all that is 'constitutive' in the twentieth-century 'pianism'. This is, however, only the musical world of the first part of the composition and, more appropriately, of its first big section, as the form constitutes here an indivisible, complementary, two-in-one whole.

Tha' Munnot Waste No Time is the title of one of the chapters of a well-known and once popular (now re-emarging) book for children and young people, i.e. The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. The composer 'found' that title after completing the whole of the work – and it seemed to him ideally suited to the idea that he had wanted to convey. In the festival programme book (1999) Knapik wrote: '(...) The book, which is addressed to young readers, is about the timeless longings for Harmony, Beauty, Good and Friendship. Its basic premise is that these values are around us, and that often we are very close to them. Unfortunately, so often between the 'secret garden' and us (or maybe inside us), a wall springs up completely covering the object of our desires (...).'

The 'door' in the musical garden has, however, been found, a symbolic key to it being the transformation of a 'dissonant' tritone-fifth structure into one consisting of pure fifths. One small step, a minor second, suddenly changes here the whole world. The music begins to revive and 'grow', a powerful musical wave carries us into a different reality. 'This is the true world!' the composer seems to be saying. We seem to recognise this world, too: the world of Ravel's music, his harmonies and colours, his 'symphonic' pianistic art. Gaspard? And perhaps also La valse? Daphnis? And the culminating point: a simple melody on the clarinet (one cannot talk here about ad libitum !) and the simplest, triadic harmonies. After that everything disappears.

It is a beautiful piece, but also very difficult to perform, like any other piece by Knapik. The composer seems to be saying, however, that what is truly beautiful cannot, after all, be easy. But also that which is beautiful – although difficult – can be natural and simple (but never banal!). And it is perhaps just because of this that Knapik's musical world – if one can only develop a taste for it – is capable of attracting and touching us.

Tha' Munnot Waste No Time by Eugeniusz Knapik was recorded on 'Warsaw Autumn' 1999 CD No. 3 by Iwona Mironiuk, Szabolocs Esztenyi, Eugeniusz Knapik (pianos) and Aleksander Romaniuk (clarinet). Information concerning the availability of the music in the version for three pianos may be obtained from PWM Edition.

Stanisław Kosz