Krzysztof Penderecki Quotes

Krzysztof Penderecki

Profession : Composer

Birth : November 23, 1933

After music, trees are my passion. My great-grandfather was a forester, so maybe it is genetic. My father would take me for walks in the forest and sometimes I would play truant with him. 'You won't learn anything in a communist school, my boy,' he would say. He loved trees too.

Krzysztof Penderecki

Poland is my home, my roots are here. There is nowhere I would rather live.

Krzysztof Penderecki

I think in work like 'Passion According to St Luke,' which I wrote when the Church was being persecuted by the Communist regime, it mattered to me to declare for the cause. I sided with the militant Church and I think my music fulfilled an important socio-political function.

Krzysztof Penderecki

Poles have a mistrust of the West and an even deeper mistrust of the East.

Krzysztof Penderecki

Melody was banned from music by the composers of the avant-garde. I was unique among them in always using and writing melody and so I think this is why I've shared my music, why they can have also pleasure, not only an interesting structure.

Krzysztof Penderecki

I started with very tonal 19th-century music because I wanted to be a violinist as a child. So this was my first music, and then I was very much influenced by Stravinsky and Shostakovich in the 1950s. But I was starting to develop my own style.

Krzysztof Penderecki

Latin is an international language.

Krzysztof Penderecki

I'm never satisfied. I don't think about what has come before because I'm trying to find something different than I did before.

Krzysztof Penderecki

I accept all of the music that I wrote.

Krzysztof Penderecki

Composers are very individual creatures.

Krzysztof Penderecki

I was a very religious child.

Krzysztof Penderecki

I have written many works to accompany Old Church Slavonic texts.

Krzysztof Penderecki

My family was very open. My grandfather was German and a Protestant. My father, a lawyer, was Greek-Catholic and played the violin. My mother was very religious and went to church twice a day. My grandmother was Armenian. So I was raised with three different faiths - that's why I am so open.

Krzysztof Penderecki

I have found my perfect place on earth in Poland, in Luslawice, near Krakow.

Krzysztof Penderecki

I always had my roots in the past.

Krzysztof Penderecki

I have about 1,700 species of trees, almost everything that can grow in our climate.

Krzysztof Penderecki

The communists saw what we did in the arts as the only product of socialism that was known in the West, so they tolerated it.

Krzysztof Penderecki

I have lived through very difficult times.

Krzysztof Penderecki

When the Second World War started, I was only five but I still remember... Being a witness... I wanted people to remember what happened in our country and elsewhere.

Krzysztof Penderecki

I have always had an audience for my music, even in the very avant garde, crazy times.

Krzysztof Penderecki