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Wladyslaw Szpilman (English spelling: Vladislav Szpilman) (December 5, 1911–July 6, 2000) was a Polish pianist, composer, and novelist. He is perhaps best known as the subject of the Roman Polanski film The Pianist (film), based on his autobiography of the same name.
Life
[edit]Szpilman was born in Sosnowiec, Poland, to a Jewish family, and studied the piano in the early 1930s in Warsaw and Berlin. In Berlin, he was instructed by Leonid Kreutzer and Artur Schnabel, and he studied composing with Franz Schreker. After Adolf Hitler seized power in Germany in 1933, Szpilman returned to Warsaw. Szpilman composed many classical pieces and some popular songs and soundtracks, such as Wrzos (1937) and Dr. Murek (1939), and he toured Poland accompanying the American violinist Bronislav Gimpel.
In 1935, Szpilman went to work as a pianist for Polish Radio, where he was employed until the German invasion of Poland reached Warsaw in the autumn of 1939 and Polish 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. Szpilman remained in the 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 by sheer luck.
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. He found places to hide in Warsaw, helped by members of the Polish underground. He had to change hiding places several times; one place was a bombed apartment building, where he had to climb over a scorched corpse for months to reach his room. He maintained his sanity by going over all the pieces he had ever played or composed in his head, paying meticulous attention to detail. Towards the end of the war, he found refuge in a ruined house in which the Germans suddenly made their headquarters.
Szpilman's survival is credited in part to Wilm Hosenfeld, a German captain who had grown ashamed of his country's Nazi policies. Hosenfeld discovered Szpilman when the latter was searching for something to eat. Hosenfeld asked Szpilman who he was and demanded proof that he was a pianist, leading him to an old piano. At this point, Szpilman had not touched a piano for two and a half years, yet out of fear for his life he played Chopin's Ballade No.1 in G minor, op. 23. Hosenfeld provided Szpilman with food and army clothes to keep him from freezing to death when the Germans evacuated Warsaw. When the Soviet Union's Red Army captured Warsaw and Szpilman went out to greet his rescuers, he was shot at and nearly killed. He called out "I'm Polish!" to the soldiers. When they asked why he was wearing a German officer's coat, he answered, "I was cold." Hosenfeld later died in Soviet captivity.
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, which was the last piece Polish Radio had transmitted before the war.
From 1945 to 1963 Szpilman was director of the Music Department at Polish Radio, and he composed several symphonic works and about 500 songs, including some children's songs still popular in Poland today, as well as music for radio plays and film. 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.
In 2000, Szpilman died in Warsaw at age 88.
Memoirs
[edit]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 book, first in German as Das wunderbare Überleben (The Fantastic 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 CDs of his father's works, titled Wendy Lands sings the songs of the Pianist (Universal Music), Original recordings of the Pianist, and Wladyslaw Szpilman - Legendary recordings (Sony Classical).
References
[edit]- The Pianist: The Extraordinary True Story of One Man's Survival in Warsaw, 1939-1945 by Władysław Szpilman (2002) ISBN 0312311354