The concert at Warsaw’s Museum of the History of Polish Jews will mark exactly 80 years since Szpilman gave a live recital at Polish Radio amid the thunder of German bombs.
Young Polish pianist Marcin Masecki will on Monday afternoon perform pieces including Chopin’s Nocturne in C sharp minor, the very same composition Szpilman played on September 23, 1939.
That day a German bomb hit the Polish Radio building and the station fell silent for six years.
Szpilman described the recital in his memoirs. He wrote: “As it turned out later, it was the last live music broadcast on Polish Radio. Bombs kept falling in the immediate vicinity of the studio, the neighbouring houses were on fire. I could hardly hear the sound of my own piano in the deafening roar.”
Szpilman, who was a Polish Jew, miraculously avoided capture by the Nazis. In the final months of the war, he found shelter in the ruins of Warsaw and survived thanks to help from his Polish friends and German officer Wilm Hosenfeld.
After the war, he served as director of Polish Radio’s music department for 18 years. He then founded the Warsaw Piano Quintet, which toured the world for more than two decades.
His compositional output includes some 500 songs, many of which became hits, and several symphonic works.
![Władysław Szpilman (1911-2000). Photo: [Public domain]](//static.prsa.pl/images/7cae04d0-c6bf-43f5-b1c7-118ae8c6e4ba.jpg)
Władysław Szpilman (1911-2000). Photo: [Public domain]
Szpilman published his wartime memoirs soon after World War II ended, but the book was soon banned by Poland’s Stalinist authorities.
It was republished by Szpilman’s son in 1998, in German and English, and has since been translated into more than 30 languages.
Szpilman’s extraordinary life was transferred to the silver screen by director Roman Polanski in the Oscar-awarded movie The Pianist.
Szpilman died in 2000 at the age of 88.
(mk/gs)