Polish composer Witold Lutosławski may well not have approved of my attempt to talk about his Third Symphony, one of the few postwar pieces that managed to invent a discourse that’s at once a rejection of symphonic conventions yet is also a bracing renewal of the idea of “the symphony”. Premiered in 1983 by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and George Solti, it's music that’s definitively “symphonic” even if it doesn’t sound like many – or any – previous works in the genre.



My nervousness is because Lutosławski (who died in 1994) always resisted attempts to connect his life’s work with the circumstances of is creation, either in terms of his personal life or the broader context of the precipitous Polish politics through which he lived. But his Third Symphony was composed and premiered at a time when Lutosławski’s involvement in Polish public life had been suspended, when he was growing more sympathetic to and supportive of the Solidarity movement. Having been Poland's most feted and most powerful figurehead as composer, conductor and creative, Lutosławski left the public stage in Poland when martial law was declared in the country in December 1981, the same period in which the Third Symphony was being written and prepared for its premiere; after which, Lutosławski accepted an award from Solidarity’s Committee for Independent Culture later in 1983.

If you do want to hear the Third Symphony as a kind of protest piece, there are some musical catalysts that might support your interpretation: listen to the way the piece starts, with a hammered-out, four-fold repetition of a unison E. That can’t help but remind you, surely, of the symphony that started off this whole series, Beethoven’s Fifth, and its supposed “fate knocking at the door” connotation (although that’s just another interpretative can of worms, as we know!). Lutosławski’s gesture of implacable force and violence recurs throughout the opening minutes of the symphony, contrasting with passages of filigree fragility, which are squashed into submission by the repetitions of those four notes – which are also the last sounds you hear in the piece, half an hour later. But that’s just the start of this potential interpretative journey. The narrative of the symphony can sound like a search for a freedom of expression which is progressively achieved – in moments like this magnificently searching melody, one of the great lyrical moments in post-war music, I think, reclaiming and redefining what a genuinely moving non-tonal musical melody can be – and then revoked, stamped out, by the violence of the rest of the orchestra; and then the final repetition of that four-note fist of fate.

And even more powerfully, there’s Lutosławski’s unique musical grammar of sections of “ad libitum” or “controlled aleatoricism” (sections in which individual players are rhythmically un-coordinated, but in which the pitch field they have to play, and the character, and the overall affect of the music, are defined by the composer – in fact, there’s more “control” here than “chance”, but the idea of a musical individualism, of a multitude of separate voices as opposed to a mono-dimensional musical collectivism still stands), contrasting with “ad battuta” – conventionally defined, obey-the-conductor passages. That’s a suggestive musical parallel, surely, between the ideas of totalitarian control and democratic freedom, especially given how Lutosławski characterises the music he writes for these different kinds of orchestral music-making.

With all of those suggestive grounds for interpretation, perhaps it’s no surprise that one critic at the Chicago premiere said that the piece was “exactly what might be expected of a Polish composer at the moment”, in voicing the people’s protest at military rule. And there then came a revealing glimpse that Lutosławski was not – for perhaps the first time – completely ruling out any extra-musical interpretation of his symphony. As Andrzej Chłopecki reports, following the first performance, Lutosławski told a group of Polish musicologists:

“If we agree that music can mean anything extra-musical, it nevertheless remains ambiguous meaning. But man has a single soul and whatever he experiences in life must have some influence on him. If man has a single psyche, then the world of sounds, despite its autonomy, is still a function of that psyche. So I would limit myself to stating that if the last movement of the symphony makes the impression it makes and keeps the listener in suspense, it is certainly not by chance. I would admittedly feel honoured if I managed to express something connected not only to my personal experience but also to that of other people.”

Now that’s something: Lutosławski always wanted his music to communicate with his listeners (he talked about writing music as “soul-fishing” for like-minded sensibilities in the world), but he seems to go further here, knowing that “other people” in Poland in 1983 would surely mean the symphony resonated with a broader social political discourse about freedom and repression in people’s “psyches”.

Well: maybe. The point is, the problem with these descriptive words is that they limit the Third Symphony's interpretation and the way the piece can be imagined. Which is not to say those things aren’t a legitimate way of thinking about the symphony’s drama, but they are consequences of Lutosławski’s unique symphonic solutions rather than the reason for it. This is music of virtuosic compositional coherence and expressive diversity. The coherence is important, since Lutosławski spent his life finding and refining a musical language that could be as malleable and communicative as the tonal system, but one which had to be fit for purpose as a new, modernist musical idiom.

But the range of expression is even more important. Lutosławski describes the structure of the symphony with words of fastidious jargonistic neutrality:

“The work consists of two movements, preceded by a short introduction and followed by an epilogue and a coda. It is played without a break. The first movement comprises three episodes, of which the first is the fastest, the second slower and the third is the slowest. The basic tempo remains the same and the differences of speed are realised by the lengthening of the rhythmical units. Each episode is followed by a short, slow intermezzo. It is based on a group of toccata-like themes contrasting with a rather singing one: a series of differentiated tuttis leads to a climax of the whole work. Then comes the last movement, based on a slow singing theme and a sequence of short dramatic recitatives played by the string group. A short and very fast coda ends the piece.”

That bland architectonic crib-sheet can’t prepare you for the impact of what you’ll experience in the Third Symphony. (Or perhaps it enhances the shock of what you hear - maybe that’s the cunning expressive ploy of Lutosławski’s prose.) But I wouldn’t attempt to try and figure out where you are according to his scheme if you’re listening to the piece for the first time. Instead, it’s better to thrill to the play of juxtaposition and contrast that’s happening moment-by-moment in this symphony; something that paradoxically adds up to what should be an overwhelming cumulative experience, above all by the time you get to that breathtakingly dynamic coda. And if you’re returning to this most convincing of post-tonal symphonies, you’ll find that the more you enter its symphonic labyrinth, the more you’ll discover. Back to that thorny question of interpretation for the final time: the deeper you go into its musical mysteries, the more profoundly expressive, and the more resonatingly meaningful, you’ll find it. That’s an expansion rather than limitation of its meaning - and Lutosławski surely wouldn’t have wanted to complain about that!

Three key recordings

The composer’s own recording has a unique authority, but there’s a more visceral drama in Wit’s performance, and refinement and tensile strength in Salonen’s interpretation.

Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra/Witold Lutosławski

Los Angeles Philharmonic/Esa-Pekka Salonen

Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra/Antoni Wit