Krzysztof Meyer

A plea for an idiosyncratic tonal language that can be distinguished from the sounds of the avant-garde

Krzysztof Meyer comes from a family of doctors in Krakow. Born in the summer of the war year 1943, he received his first musical impressions at his paternal grandmother's house concerts. He began taking piano lessons at an early age and added theory and composition lessons at the age of eleven. During his grammar school years, a sister of the pianist and Chopin editor Jan Ekier encouraged his piano playing until he was ready to perform.
His subsequent studies in composition with Krzysztof Penderecki at the Krakow Academy of Music, which lasted several years, turned out to be a rather narrow one, leaving the maestro little time for his students alongside his work on the St Luke Passion and many concert tours. However, Nadia Boulanger invited him to her composition courses in Fontainebleau and Paris on several occasions. He also gained the trust of Dmitri Shostakovich in Moscow, who became his artistic mentor over the years, as did Witold Lutoslawski in Warsaw. He felt a lifelong bond of gratitude to both.
From 1965-67, Meyer worked as a pianist in the Krakow ensemble for contemporary music ‘WM-2’. From 1966 to 1987, he taught music theory at the university in his home town. He spent the academic year 1980/81 in Hamburg on a scholarship from the Senate. From 1987 until his retirement in 2008, he taught a masterclass in composition at the Cologne University of Music and Dance.
Although Krzysztof Meyer was called to be a creative musician, he also made a name for himself as a music writer. He wrote the first monograph on Dmitri Shostakovich (Kraków 1973, German Leipzig 1980, plus Bergisch-Gladbach 1995, revised Mainz 2008) and - together with his wife, the musicologist Danuta Gwizdalanka - a two-volume monograph on Witold Lutoslawski (Kraków 2003/04).

Main features of his work

Meyer's compositional beginnings date back to the 1960s, when the trends of the Western avant-garde arrived in Poland through the gateway of the ‘Warsaw Autumn’ festival: serial and punctual compositional processes, quarter-tone music, experiments in the transitional zone of sound and noise, games with controlled chance. As a young composer, he initially endeavoured to adopt the techniques and tones of his role models.
In the 1970s, the pursuit of ‘unheard-of’ sound effects took a back seat to the endeavour to gain new creative perspectives from the study of older masters (J. S. Bach, Mozart, Brahms) and the classics of the 20th century (Bartók, Shostakovich, Lutoslavsky). In his search for his own hierarchy of sounds, he developed a harmonic system in the later 1980s and 1990s which (similar to Bartók's) is centred on an axis around a tone or interval. He favours the tritone.
In his search for a dramaturgy that takes into account the performance limits of aural memory without copying historical patterns, he found the cross-work model of a five-phase form of development, consisting of an initial phase, main phase, transitional phase, a ‘phase of particular importance’ and the final phase: a structural principle similar to classical drama that has since lent his symphonies, concertos and chamber music a purposeful narrative character. Every detail is related to the whole.In principle, Meyer adheres to the maxim: limitation of material, diversity of
development. In his ‘housekeeping’ with the idea, in the growing chastity of his formulations and in the technique of developing variation, the Polish composer's working methods and work ethic resemble the creative principles of Brahms, whom he says he has learnt to appreciate more and more - an ‘elective affinity’ to which he already professed during his Hamburg scholarship with the Hommage à Johannes Brahms for orchestra op. 59 (1982).
Meyer knows from his own experience as a performer that a clear, uncomplicated score is necessary in order to effectively unfold the dramaturgy of the music on the podium. ‘The typeface of the score and the parts should be as functional and simple as possible.’ He therefore considers the ability to notate the sound vision of a work plausibly to be one of the most important aspects of compositional technique. The scores of Lutoslawski and Ligeti are masterpieces of orthographic precision.
When naming his works, Meyer favours traditional genre terms. In terms of compositional technique, polyphonic thinking prevails. Combinations of numbers, symmetries and proportions (golden section) are constants in his compositions, as are expressive density, richness of tone colour and instrumental virtuosity, which emerged in a style-defining manner towards the end of the 20th century. With the Symphonies 7 and 8 - Sinfonia del tempo che passa op. 97 (2002/03) and Sinfonia da Requiem op. 111 (2007) or the Chansons d'un rêveur solitaire for soprano and orchestra on poems by Paul Verlaine op. 116 (2012), ‘autumnal’ tones emerge after the millennium.

Creative relationship between instrumental music and vocal music

If one adds up the time he has spent composing, Meyer's ten symphonies, nine solo concertos, three double concertos and fifteen string quartets to date make him an instrumental composer par excellence. As a performing musician, virtuoso pianist and experienced piano partner of renowned string quartets and chamber ensembles, he is always guided as a composer by a sense of the uninhibitedly possible. Driven by his knowledge of the capabilities of the human sense of hearing and auditory memory, his demands on the performers always maintain a balance between physical effort and artistic effect.
The predominance of instrumental genres in his workshop does not diminish the importance of his vocal music. With the ‘fantastic comic opera’ “Kyberiade” (1967/70), the Choral Mass op. 68 (1987; rev. 1996), the children's opera ‘The Enchanted Brothers’ (1988/89), the Te Deum op. 84 (1995; 2006), the oratorio ‘Creation’ (1998/99) and now even the full-length three-act opera ‘Szlowiek na torach albo do trzech razy sztuka’ (2019/22), Meyer has certified himself as a vocal composer and music dramatist in equal measure.
Meyer describes the piece as "a kind of satire, a grotesque that turns into a tragedy in the third act. Of course, the music also contains illustrative elements, but in terms of harmony, rhythm, instrumentation and pitch organisation, it is closely related to my “absolute” music, both chamber music and orchestral music."
The vocal parts are mostly recitative-like. But there are also ensemble scenes, even some ‘arias par excellence’ in contemporary tonal language. According to Meyer, this has a variety of moods and characters and is therefore ‘not a pure abstraction.’ In a way, one could even speak of a musical kinship with his earlier ‘Kyberiade’ (1967/70). The subject matter of both operas is ‘similarly surrealistic and humorous’, as is the unconventional instrumentation.
For years, he had been trying to carefully construct his personal sound world and create music ‘that would be recognisable after the proverbial two bars.’ Of course, it is extremely difficult to find one's own unmistakable style, ‘which only a few composers in history have managed to do’. Nevertheless, he believes he has found ‘an unmistakable language to a certain extent’ in the works of recent years.

© Lutz Lesle, 2023
(musicologist, university lecturer, librarian, author and publicist)