ABSTRACT
Born in Lwów, Wojciech Kilar (1932–2013) was a prominent film composer both in Poland and abroad; he wrote music for more than a hundred films, including such major international releases as Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Jane Campion’s The Portrait of a Lady, and Roman Polanski’s Death and the Maiden. But Kilar was also an important symphonic composer. Alongside Górecki and Penderecki, he made his debut in the aura of novelty and modernity at the first Warsaw Autumn Festival in 1956; he experimented with serialism, and he quickly emerged as one of the leaders of so-called Polish School of constructivist sonorism. Later, in the 1970s and 1980s, and inspired as much by folk sources as by religious devotion, his concert music became less complex, yet it was still willingly performed by major international orchestras. After the success of Dracula in 1992 Kilar devoted his energies mostly to film music, but in the last several years of his life he returned to the writing of symphonic works. This chapter discusses the entirety of Kilar’s ‘double life’ in music, a life in which composing for film and composing for the concert hall were sometimes seriously at odds.
