Władysław Szpilman
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Władysław Szpilman (December 5, 1911 – July 6, 2000) was a Polish pianist, composer, and memoirist. He is best known as the protagonist of the Roman Polański film The Pianist, based on Szpilman's autobiographical book recounting how he survived World War II. In November 1998 Wladyslaw Szpilman was honoured by president of Poland with a Kommandor Order with a Star of Polonia Restituta.
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[edit] Early life and education
Szpilman was born in Sosnowiec, Poland, to a Jewish family. After early piano lessons with his mother Esthera, he continued his piano studies in the early 1930s at the Warsaw Conservatory under A. Michalowski and at the Academy of Arts (Akademie der Künste) in Berlin under Artur Schnabel and Leonid Kreutzer, and he studied composing with Franz Schreker.
[edit] Career as a pianist
After Adolf Hitler seized power in Germany in 1933, Szpilman returned to Warsaw, where he quickly became a celebrated pianist and a composer of both classical and popular music. Szpilman composed many classical pieces, and some popular songs and soundtracks, such as Wrzos (1937) and Dr. Murek (1939), and he toured Poland accompanying violinist Bronislav Gimpel.
On 1 April 1935 he joined Polish Radio, where he worked as a pianist performing classical and jazz music, until the German invasion of Poland reached Warsaw in autumn 1939, and Polskie Radio was forced off the air. The Nazi-led General Government established ghettos in many Polish cities, including Warsaw, and Szpilman was forced to move to the Warsaw Ghetto with his family. He continued to work as a pianist in restaurants in the ghetto. Szpilman remained in the Warsaw Ghetto until it was abolished after the deportation of most of its inhabitants. Szpilman was left as a labourer and helped smuggle weapons. He evaded being caught and killed by the Germans several times.
When the rest of his family was deported to Treblinka, an extermination camp in the east, Szpilman managed to flee from the transport loading site with the help of a friend who grabbed him from the crowd and shooed him away from the waiting train. None of his family members survived the war. As set out in his memoir, Szpilman found places to hide in Warsaw and survived with the help of his friends from Polish Radio and in part by a German captain, Wilm Hosenfeld, whose real name Szpilman discovered in the early 1950s, when Hosenfeld's wife wrote him a letter. Despite the efforts of Szpilman and other Poles to rescue Hosenfeld, he died in Soviet captivity in 1952.
[edit] Polish Radio
When Szpilman resumed his job at Polish Radio in 1945, he did so by carrying on where he left off six years before: poignantly, he opened the first transmission by playing Chopin's Nocturne in C sharp minor (Lento con gran espressione), the same piece he was playing as German bombs hit the studios of Polish Radio, interrupting its broadcast on 23 September 1939.
From 1945 to 1963 Szpilman was director of the Music Department at Polish Radio. During this period he composed several symphonic works and about 500 songs, still popular in Poland today, as well as music for radio plays and film.
[edit] Compositions
In the 1950s he wrote about 40 songs for children, for which he received an award from the Polish Composers Union in 1955.
In 1961 he initiated and organized Sopot International Song Festival in Poland and founded the Polish Union of Authors of Popular Music.
Szpilman also performed as a soloist and with violinists Bronislav Gimpel, Roman Totenberg, Ida Haendel and Henryk Szeryng. In 1963, Szpilman and Gimpel founded the Warsaw Piano Quintet, with which Szpilman performed worldwide until 1986.
[edit] Book
In April 1998 his book The Pianist was published by the Ullstein Verlag, a major German publishing house. In March 1999 he visited London for Jewish Book Week, where he met English readers to mark the publication of his bestselling book in England.
[edit] Memoirs
In 1945, shortly after the war's end, Szpilman wrote a memoir about his survival in Warsaw. He published the book, titled Śmierć Miasta (Death of a City), but it was suppressed by the Polish authorities, who did not like its perspective on the war. Few copies of the book were printed, and it remained sidelined for more than 50 years.
In 1998, Szpilman's son Andrzej republished his father's work, first in German as Das wunderbare Überleben (The miraculous survival) and then in English as The Pianist. It became a bestseller and was later published in more than 30 languages. In 2002, Roman Polański directed a screen version, also called The Pianist, but Szpilman died before the film was completed. The movie won three Academy Awards, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts Best Film Award, and the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.
His son Andrzej compiled and released a CD with the most popular songs Szpilman had composed under the title Wendy Lands Sings the Songs of the Pianist (Universal Music), Works for Piano and Orchestra by Władysław Szpilman with Ewa Kupiec-Piano, John Axelrod-Director and Berliner Radio Symphony Orchestra (2004), and also the Original recordings of the Pianist and Wladyslaw Szpilman—Legendary recordings (Sony classical).
[edit] Death
In 2000, Szpilman died in Warsaw at age 88.
[edit] References
- The Pianist: The Extraordinary True Story of One Man's Survival in Warsaw, 1939-1945 by Władysław Szpilman, Foreword Andrzej Szpilman (2002) ISBN 0312311354
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- Władysław Szpilman information and biography
- Photo gallery of Szpilman
- Information - composers works at the Boosey&Hawkes
- Wladyslaw Szpilman at the Internet Movie Database
Categories: People from Sosnowiec | Polish classical pianists | Jewish classical musicians | 20th century classical composers | Jewish composers and songwriters | Polish composers | Film score composers | Songwriters | Polish writers | Polish musicians | 1911 births | 2000 deaths | History of Poland (1939–1945) | History of Warsaw | Polish songwriters | Jewish Polish history | Polish Jews
