Born in Warsaw in 1914, he studied composition and conducting at the city’s Conservatory, and further developed his conducting skills in Vienna and Paris. He spent the years of the German occupation in Warsaw, making a living as a pianist, including playing in cafes in a duo with composer friend Witold Lutosławski.
After World War Two, he served as conductor of the Kraków Philharmonic and director of the Warsaw Philharmonic. He also started an international career, giving guest performances with leading orchestras in Germany, France and England.
In 1950 he was elected vice-president of UNESCO’s International Music Council, and three years later led an official Polish cultural delegation to China, during which he had a personal meeting with Chairman Mao Tse-tung.
He wrote mass songs in praise of the communist party. In 1949 he received the Banner of Labour, the highest state distinction in People’s Poland. He won many distinctions and awards at composers’ competitions in Poland and abroad.
In 1954, unable to reconcile himself with the limits on creative freedoms imposed by the communist regime, Panufnik left Poland and settled in the United Kingdom. Having initially served as music director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, he devoted himself solely to composition.
From the time of his defection in 1954 until 1977, the publication of his works was banned in Poland, and performances almost entirely so, and even his name was rarely mentioned in publications and other media.
In 1977, as a result of an intervention by the Polish Composers’ Union with the Cultural Department of the Polish United Workers Party, the censor’s ban on Panufnik and his music was lifted and in the same year his Universal Prayer was performed at the Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music.
In 1984 he became an honorary member of the Royal Academy of Music in London, and in 1987 of the Polish Composers’ Union (from which he had been expelled in 1954). In 1987 he published his autobiography Composing Myself.
He made his first, and only, visit to Poland in 1990, after a lapse of 36 years, at the invitation of the Warsaw Autumn Festival, which featured eleven of his works, including three under his own baton: Symphony No. 10, Harmony, a poem for chamber orchestra and Violin Concerto. In the same year he received an award from the Foreign Minister of Poland for his services to Polish culture.
In 1991 Queen Elizabeth II bestowed a knighthood on Panufnik and the Music Academy in Warsaw conferred on him its honorary doctorate.
He died on October 27, 1991 at his home in Twickenham, West London. He was posthumously decorated with the Order of Reborn Poland (Polonia Restituta).
Several years ago, the Panufnik archive was donated to the Warsaw University Library by the composer’s widow Lady Camilla Panufnik and her children Jem Panufnik and Roxanna Panufnik, both of whom are musicians.
It consists of the composer’s correspondence, his programme notes, typescripts of his interviews and radio talks, concert programmes, photographs and a wide range of materials documenting his life, musical career and world-wide reception of his music.
(mk/mp)