Wladyslaw Szpilman

Wladyslaw Szpilman was a Polish Jewish pianist, composer, songwriter, and author, born on December 5, 1911, in Sosnowiec into a family of musicians. His father, Shmuel Szpilman, was a violinist, and his mother, Estera Rappaport, was a pianist. He had a brother, Henryk, and two sisters, Regina and Halina. He studied at the Warsaw Conservatory with Aleksander Michalowski and Jozef Smidowicz, both linked to the pedagogical tradition of Franz Liszt. In 1931 he won a scholarship to the Academy of Arts in Berlin, where he studied piano with Artur Schnabel and Leonid Kreutzer and composition with Franz Schreker. Returning to Warsaw in 1933, he quickly became a prominent performer and composer of classical and popular music.

On April 5, 1935, Szpilman joined Polish Radio as a house pianist, performing both classical and jazz music. He also appeared widely as a concert and chamber musician, collaborating with violinists Roman Totenberg, Bronislaw Gimpel, Henryk Szeryng, and Ida Haendel; in 1934 he toured Poland with Gimpel. Before the outbreak of World War II, he wrote symphonic music and film scores while establishing himself as a celebrated radio soloist. On September 23, 1939, he gave Polish Radio's final live music broadcast before its wartime silence, playing Chopin's Nocturne in C-sharp Minor as the station came under fire.

In 1940 Szpilman and his family were confined in the Warsaw Ghetto; because their home stood on a street incorporated into the ghetto, they did not initially have to relocate. To support his parents, brother, and sisters, he performed in venues including the Nowoczesna Cafe, a cafe on Sienna Street, and the Sztuka Cafe on Leszno Street. He played chamber music with the violinist Zygmunt Lederman and performed in a piano duo with Andrzej Goldfeder. During the mass deportations of August 1942, after his family had been selected for transport, a Jewish policeman, Izaak Heller, who knew the Szpilmans, pulled him from the transport line. His parents and siblings were deported to Treblinka and did not survive.

Szpilman remained in the ghetto as a construction laborer, narrowly avoiding death in further selections, until escaping on February 13, 1943. He subsequently hid in a succession of Warsaw apartments with assistance from colleagues at Polish Radio and fellow musicians, including Andrzej and Janina Bogucki, Czeslaw and Helena Lewicki, Edmund Rudnicki, Witold Lutoslawski, Eugenia Uminska, Piotr Perkowski, and Irena Sendler. During the Warsaw Uprising, he remained in an apartment in central Warsaw, concealing himself in the attic when necessary. After the building was set alight on August 12, he attempted to poison himself with sleeping pills but survived. He later hid in a nearby hospital and other ruined buildings, suffering from hunger, and became one of the best-known of the so-called Warsaw Robinsons, people who survived in the ruins of Warsaw after the uprising.

In November 1944, German officer Wilm Hosenfeld discovered Szpilman in the ruins, asked him to play the piano, and hid him in a loft beneath the roof. Hosenfeld then secretly brought him food and supplies until the German retreat. After the war, Szpilman resumed his work at Polish Radio in 1945, opening its first postwar broadcast with the same Chopin nocturne he had played in 1939. He directed the station's Popular Music Department from 1945 to 1963 while maintaining an active international career as a concert pianist and chamber musician in Europe, Asia, and the Americas.

Szpilman composed orchestral works, concertos, piano music, film and radio-play scores, and roughly 500 songs, more than 100 of which became popular Polish standards. He also wrote the signature music for the Polish Film Chronicle. His works include the piano suite Life of the Machines (1932), Violin Concerto (1933), Waltzer in the Olden Style (1937), Concertino for Piano and Orchestra (1940), Paraphrase on Own Themes (1948), and an Overture for Symphonic Orchestra (1968). His popular songs include “The Rain,” “Those Years Will Never Return,” “There Is No Happiness Without Love,” “I Do Not Believe the Song,” “Red Bus,” “Quiet Night,” “The Time Will Come,” and “Tomorrow Will Be a Good Day.” In the 1950s he wrote dozens of children's songs and received an award from the Polish Composers Union in 1955.

In 1961 Szpilman founded the Sopot International Song Festival and also founded the Polish Union of Authors of Popular Music. In 1963, together with Bronislaw Gimpel, he established the Warsaw Piano Quintet, later joined by Tadeusz Wronski. The ensemble gave more than two thousand concerts internationally through 1986, appearing at venues and festivals including London's Royal Festival Hall, the Salle Pleyel and Salle Gaveau in Paris, the Herkulessaal in Munich, the Salzburg Festival, and the Musikhalle Hamburg.

Szpilman wrote his wartime memoir shortly after the war; it was first published in 1946 as The Death of a City, prepared with Jerzy Waldorff. Its original text was altered before publication. In 1998, his son Andrzej issued an expanded German edition, The Miraculous Survival, followed by Anthea Bell's English translation, The Pianist, which restored details omitted or changed in the earlier version. Published in more than 35 languages, the memoir received major literary recognition, including the Jewish Quarterly Wingate Prize in 2000. It was adapted as Roman Polanski's 2002 film The Pianist, starring Adrien Brody and winning three Academy Awards.

Szpilman married Halina Grzecznarowska in 1950, and they had two sons, Krzysztof and Andrzej, the latter also becoming a musician. Wladyslaw Szpilman died in Warsaw on July 6, 2000, aged 88, and was buried at Powazki Military Cemetery. His legacy remains central to Polish musical culture and to the remembrance of wartime Warsaw.