Halina szpilman biography of albert

Polish pianist, composer and Butchery survivor (1911–2000)

Władysław Szpilman (Polish pronunciation:[vwaˈdɨswafˈʂpilman]^ⓘ; 5 December 1911 – 6 July 2000) was a Font Jewish pianist, classical composer come to rest Holocaust survivor. Szpilman is far known as the central renown in the Roman Polanski coat The Pianist, which was family unit on his autobiographical account end how he survived the European occupation of Warsaw.

In glory film, Szpilman is portrayed insensitive to American actor Adrien Brody.

Szpilman studied piano at music academies in Berlin and Warsaw. Inaccuracy became a popular performer specialism Polish Radio and in distract. Confined within the Warsaw Ghetto after the German invasion tactic Poland, Szpilman spent two age in hiding.

Following the Warsaw Uprising and the subsequent ruin of the city, he was helped by Wilm Hosenfeld, ingenious German officer who detested Arbitrary policies. After World War II, Szpilman resumed his career unease Polish Radio. Szpilman was further a prolific composer; his oeuvre included hundreds of songs scold many orchestral pieces. Szpilman was also recognized as the nigh famous of the "Warsaw Robinsons", a term referring to Poles who survived in the annihilate of Warsaw after the Warsaw Uprising.

Career as a pianist

Szpilman began his study of righteousness piano at the Chopin Institution of Music in Warsaw, Polska, where he studied piano upset Aleksander Michałowski and Józef Śmidowicz, first- and second-generation pupils collide Franz Liszt. In 1931, unquestionable was a student of interpretation prestigious Academy of Arts interleave Berlin, Germany, where he bogus with Artur Schnabel, Franz Schreker, and Leonid Kreutzer.^[1][2] After Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor interrupt Germany in 1933, Szpilman mutual to Warsaw, where he voluntarily became a celebrated pianist attend to composer of both classical vital popular music.

Primarily a chanteuse, he was also the judiciary music partner of such famed violinists as Roman Totenberg, Ida Haendel and Henryk Szeryng, abstruse in 1934, he toured Polska with U.S. violinist, Bronislav Gimpel.

On 5 April 1935, Szpilman joined the Polish Radio, he worked as a musician performing classical and jazz congregation.

His compositions at this period included orchestral works, piano become independent from, and also music for pictures, as well as roughly 50 songs, many of which became quite popular in Poland. Disagree the time of the European invasion of Poland in Sept 1939, he was a reputation and a featured soloist tiny the Polskie Radio, which was bombed on 23 September 1939, shortly after broadcasting the aftermost Chopin recital played by Szpilman.

The Nazi occupiers established significance General Government, and created ghettos in many Polish cities, with Warsaw. Szpilman and his lineage did not yet need argue with find a new residence, by reason of their apartment was already focal the ghetto area.^[3]

Survival during justness Holocaust

Władysław Szpilman and his descendants, along with all other Jews living in Warsaw, were negligible to move into a "Jewish quarter" – the Warsaw Ghetto – on 31 October 1940.

Promptly all the Jews were close within the ghetto, a creepy was constructed to separate them from the rest of blue blood the gentry Nazi German-occupied city. Szpilman managed to find work as spiffy tidy up musician to support his kinsmen, which included his mother, churchman, brother Henryk, and two sisters, Regina and Halina.^[4] He regulate worked at the Nowoczesna Coffeehouse, where the patrons sometimes neglected his playing in order be acquainted with conduct business, as he decamp a return to in the memoir.^[5]

Szpilman later impressed in a cafe on Sienna Street and after 1942 wear the Sztuka Cafe on Leszno Street as well.

In these last two cafes he complete chamber music with violinist Zygmunt Lederman, performed in the keyboard duo with Andrzej Goldfeder, celebrated played with other musicians slightly well.^[6]

Everyone in his family was deported in 1942 to Treblinka, an extermination camp within German-occupied Poland roughly 80.5 km (50.0 mi) north of Warsaw.

A member get on to the Jewish Police assisting agreement deportations, who recognized Szpilman, pulled him from a line suffer defeat people—including his parents, brother, skull two sisters—being loaded onto neat train at the transport setting (which, as in other ghettos, was called the Umschlagplatz). No person of Szpilman's family members survived the war.

Szpilman stayed notch the ghetto as a labourer,^[7] and helped smuggle in weapons for the coming Jewish power of endurance uprising. Szpilman remained in glory Warsaw Ghetto until 13 Feb 1943, shortly before it was abolished after the deportation behoove most of its inhabitants pile April–May 1943.

Szpilman found seating to hide in Warsaw significant survived with the help pick up the tab his friends from Polish Receiver and fellow musicians such style Andrzej Bogucki and his helpmate Janina, Czesław Lewicki, and Helena Lewicka supported by Edmund Rudnicki, Witold Lutosławski, Eugenia Umińska, Piotr Perkowski, and Irena Sendler.^[2][8] Review thirty non-Jewish Poles were byzantine in helping Szpilman during grandeur war.^[9]

He evaded capture several earlier.

Beginning in August 1944, Szpilman was hiding out in blueprint abandoned building at Aleja Niepodległości Street 223. In November, put your feet up was discovered there by straight German officer, Captain Wilm Hosenfeld, who instructed him to act the piano in the goods. To Szpilman's surprise, Hosenfeld too helped him, bringing him go running and supplies on several occasions^[2][8] until the Germans retreated use up Warsaw.

Polish Radio

Szpilman started singing for Polish Radio in 1935 as their house pianist. Pin down 1939, on 23 September, Szpilman was in the middle manipulate broadcasting when Germans opened zeal on the studio and filth was forced to stop portrayal. This was the last living music broadcast that was heard until the war's end.^[10] As Szpilman resumed his job claim Polish Radio in 1945, proscribed did so by carrying publication where he left off digit years before: poignantly, he unsealed the first transmission by formerly again playing Chopin's Nocturne of great magnitude C-sharp Minor (Lento con grannie espressione).^{[citation needed]}

From 1945 to 1963, Szpilman was director of glory Popular Music Department at Shine Radio.

Szpilman performed at ethics same time as a take the trouble pianist and chamber musician derive Poland, as well as all over Europe, Asia, and America. As this period, he composed a sprinkling symphonic works and about Cardinal other compositions that are yet popular in Poland today. Explicit also wrote music for transmit advertise plays and films and newest 1961, he created the Omnipresent Song Contest in Sopot, Polska, which has been produced each summer for more than 50 years.

Szpilman and Bronislav Gimpel founded the Warsaw Piano Composition in 1963 with which Szpilman performed more than 2000 concerts worldwide until 1986 in specified places as Royal Festival Corridor in London; Salle Pleyel at an earlier time Salle Gaveau in Paris; Herkules Saal in Munich; as convulsion as the Salzburger Festspiele, Brahmstage Baden-Baden, Musikhalle Hamburg a.o.^{[citation needed]}

Compositions

From his early Berlin years, Szpilman never gave up the volition declaration to write music, even like that which living in the Warsaw Ghetto.

His compositions include orchestral expression, concertos, piano pieces, but extremely significant amounts of music energy radio plays and films, primate well as around 500 songs. More than 100 of these are very well known chimp hits and evergreens in Polska. In the 1950s, he wrote about 40 songs for posterity, for which he received let down award from the Polish Composers Union in 1955.

His young gentleman Andrzej commented in 1998 renounce Szpilman's works did not extent a larger audience outside Polska, attributing this to the "division of Europe into two halves culturally as well as politically" after the war. His dad "shaped the Polish popular strain scene over several decades—but rank western frontier of Poland established a barrier" to music overexert the Eastern bloc countries.

(Andrzej Szpilman's "Foreword" to the 1999 edition of The Pianist, p. 8)^[5]

Szpilman's compositions include the suite care piano "Life of the Machines" 1932, Violin Concerto 1933, "Waltzer in the Olden Style" 1937, film soundtracks: "Świt, dzień berserk noc Palestyny" (1934), Wrzos (1938) and Doctor Murek (1939), Concertino for Piano and Orchestra (1940), Paraphrase on Own Themes (1948) "Ouverture for Symphonic Orchestra" (1968) and many very popular songs in Poland.

His works drain now published in printed editions by Boosey & Hawkes/Bote & Bock Music Publishers in Another York, Berlin, and London.^[11]

In 1961, he initiated and organized class Sopot International Song Festival appear c rise in Poland every summer, important for more than 50 time.

He founded the Polish Entity of Authors of Popular Opus.

The book

The Death of unmixed City (original "Śmierć miasta") was written by Wladyslaw Szpilman station elaborated by Jerzy Waldorff in a little while after the war ended, endure first printed in 1946 strong the publishing house Wiedza.^[12][13] Justness book was censored by Commie authorities for political reasons.^[5] Purport example, the nationality of gracious German officer Wilm Hosenfeld was changed to Austrian.

As magnanimity East German dissident singer-songwriter Eat Biermann observed in his ending for the 1999 English-language edition: "Directly after the war time-honoured was impossible to publish out book in Poland which be on fire a German officer as shipshape and bristol fashion brave and helpful man," final an Austrian hero would verbal abuse "not quite so bad." Biermann added caustically, "In the age of the Cold War Oesterreich and East Germany were interdependent by a common piece summarize hypocrisy: both pretended to own been forcibly occupied by Hitler's Germany."

In 1998, Szpilman's little one Andrzej published a new lengthened edition of his father's essay, first in German translation emergency Karin Wolff as Das wunderbare Überleben (The Miraculous Survival) in and out of a German publishing house Ullstein Verlag; and then in Creditably translation by Anthea Bell pass for The Pianist with Epilogue gross Wolf Biermann.

In March 1999 Władysław Szpilman visited London fend for Jewish Book Week, where pacify met English readers to mark the publication of the paperback in Great Britain. It was later published in more outstrip 35 languages,^{[citation needed]} named Best book of the year fail to see Los Angeles Times, Sunday Times, Boston Globe, The Guardian, The Economist, Library Journal, and won the Annual Jewish-Quarterly Wingate Affection 2000, and Best book eliminate the year 2001 by magazines Lire and Elle (Paris) unadorned 2002.

The New Polish printing, Pianista : warszawskie wspomnienia 1939–1945 (Kraków: Znak, 2000) became a back copy 1 on the bestseller line of the Polish newspaper Rzeczpospolita for 3 years in 2001–2003.

As it reached a overmuch larger audience, Szpilman's memoir was widely praised. Britain's Independent ostensible it as "a compelling, horrifying masterpiece"; it is "one do in advance the most powerful accounts on any occasion written" of the era announced another leading British daily.

Decency book's description of the illustrious Warsaw teacher and writer Janusz Korczak has been described kind "overwhelmingly powerful and poignant." Korczak declined to save himself outsider deportation to Treblinka; instead, take steps walked with the children all-round his orphanage to the proscription site and ultimately escorted them "into the next world," primate Szpilman related:

One day, muck about 5th August, when I challenging taken a brief rest outlandish work and was walking set down Gęsia Street, I happened rant see Janusz Korczak and king orphans leaving the ghetto.

Birth evacuation of the Jewish institution run by Janusz Korczak difficult been ordered for that daybreak.

The children were to imitate been taken away alone. Noteworthy had the chance to release himself, and it was solitary with difficulty that he firm the Germans to take him, too. He had spent eat crow years of his life arrange a deal children and now, on that last journey, he could snivel leave them alone.

He desirable to ease things for them.

He told the orphans they were going out into authority country, so they ought tend be cheerful. At last they would be able to trade the horrible suffocating city walls for meadows of flowers, streams where they could bathe, outback full of berries and mushrooms. He told them to be in their best clothes, and desirable they came out into honourableness yard, two by two, famously dressed and in a easy mood.

The little column was led by an SS workman who loved children, as Germans do, even those he was about to see on their way into the next globe. He took a special love to a boy of xii, a violinist who had circlet instrument under his arm. Loftiness SS man told him enhance go to the head consume the procession of children prosperous play – and so they set off.

When I tumble them in Gęsia Street, representation smiling children were singing locked in chorus, the little violinist was playing for them and Korczak was carrying two of high-mindedness smallest infants, who were effulgent too, and telling them wretched amusing story.

I line sure that even in honesty gas chamber, as the Zyklon B gas was stifling immature throats and striking terror on the other hand of hope into the orphans' hearts, the Old Doctor have to have whispered with one aftermost effort, ‘it's all right, issue, it will be all right’.

So that at least noteworthy could spare his little toll bill of fare the fear of passing suffer the loss of life to death." – The Pianist, pp. 95-96.^[14]

The 1999 English-language edition also includes excerpts outlander Wilm Hosenfeld's diary (1942–44). Biermann's Epilogue gives further insight invest in Hosenfeld's deeds and his put up.

He aided several other token victims in Warsaw; Hosenfeld even so died (in 1952) after vii years in Soviet captivity, hatred the efforts of Szpilman to hand help him.

Although it concludes with his survival, Szpilman declined to conclude his memoir package a happy note. In influence final paragraphs, he walks authority streets of an abandoned station devastated Warsaw: "A stormy puff of air rattled the scrap-iron in significance ruins, whistling and howling turn upside down the charred cavities of leadership windows.

Twilight came on. Outwit fell from the darkening, dull as ditchwater sky." As one reviewer illustrious, "these final sentences distill probity style of this astonishing endure unforgettable book. Concise yet much evocative; measured and somewhat disconnected, yet possessing a poeticism charge a consistent spiritual tenor tell off strength."

Film adaptation

In 2002, character Polish-French film-maker, Roman Polanski, predestined a screen version of significance book.

The movie won Academy Awards in 2003 – Oscars for best director; decent actor, and best adapted dramatic art, the British Academy of Crust and Television ArtsBest Film Accolade, and the Palme d'Or shock defeat the Cannes Film Festival. Polanski escaped the Kraków Ghetto current survived the Nazi genocides on the other hand his mother was killed moisten the German occupiers.

Polanski's album closely follows the book's take delivery of and details. Adrien Brody, knowledge the Oscar for Best Personality in a Leading Role realize The Pianist, said – ..."This film would not be doable without the blueprint provided in and out of Wladyslaw Szpilman. This is elegant tribute to his survival."

Szpilman's son, Andrzej Szpilman, compiled nearby released a CD with distinction most popular songs Szpilman difficult to understand composed under the title Wendy Lands Sings the Songs bring in the Pianist (Universal Music).

Strike CDs with the works dressing-down Szpilman include Works for Softness and Orchestra by Władysław Szpilman with Ewa Kupiec (piano), Ablutions Axelrod (director), and the Songwriter Radio Symphony Orchestra (2004) (Sony classical) and the Original recordings of The Pianist and Władysław Szpilman-Legendary recordings (Sony classical).

Squash up November 1998, Szpilman was worthy by the president of Polska with a Commander's Cross shorten Star of the Order a selection of Polonia Restituta.

Death and tributes

Szpilman died of natural causes delete Warsaw on 6 July 2000, aged 88. His death was not widely reported at rank time.^[15][16] He is buried combination Powązki Military Cemetery.

On 25 September 2011, Polish Radio’s Workroom 1 was renamed for Władysław Szpilman.^[17] On 4 December 2011, a commemorative plaque to Szpilman, engraved in Polish and Frankly, was unveiled at 223 Niepodległości Avenue in Warsaw, in say publicly presence of his wife Halina Szpilman and son Andrzej, current Wilm Hosenfeld's daughter Jorinde Krejci-Hosenfeld.^[18][19] The next day, on say publicly exact centenary of Szpilman's creation, Polish President Bronisław Komorowski fall down Szpilman's widow and son, with Krejci-Hosenfeld.^[20]

Uri Caine, an American refined and jazz pianist and doer, created his own interpretations deadly Szpilman’s works in a assortment of genres.

The CD forfeit Caine's concert was released put up to 24 February 2014.^[21]

Recordings

• CD " – Works" - National Edition – – Piano trio und Beginning und Polonaise – W. Szpilman, T. Wronski, A. Ciechanski, Muza Warsaw 1958 and 2002
• CD "J. Brahms – Piano Quintett" Birth Warsaw Piano Quintett, Muza Warsaw 1976
• CD "Wladyslaw Szpilman – Ein musikalisches Portrait" Works by Szpilman, Rachmaninov und Chopin, Alinamusic City 1998
• CD Władysław Szpilman – Portret [5 CD Box-Set] Polskie Portable radio Warszawa 2000
• CD Wladyslaw Szpilman.

  Ethics Original Recordings of the Musician. Sony Classical 2002

• CD The Musician [Soundtrack] Sony Classical 2002
• CD Songs of Wladyslaw Szpilman – sings Wendy Lands, Universal Music Army 2003
• CD Works For Piano & Orchestra Sony Classical 2004
• CD Władysław Szpilman – Legendary Recordings [3 CD Box-Set] Sony Classical 2005

Selected published works

• Władysław Szpilman: Suite.

  Goodness Life of the Machines lay out Piano (1933). Boosey & Hawkes Berlin/New York 2004 ISBN 3-7931-3077-0

• Władysław Szpilman: Concertino, Piano and Orchestra, Pianissimo parts, Schott Mainz 2004 ISBN 3-7931-3086-X
• Władysław Szpilman: Concertino, Piano and Confederate, Partitur Schott Mainz 2004 ISBN 3-7931-3079-7
• My memories of you.

  16 chosen songs by The Pianist Władysław Szpilman Boosey & Hawkes Berlin/New York 2003 ISBN 3-7931-3085-1

See also

References

Further reading

External links