His Nightmares Starred Communists, Not Nazis

London: Composers' lives are usually less interesting than lore has it, amounting to long hours at a desk, putting ideas on paper. But one relatively recent life reads like a John le Carre Cold War thriller. It is the story of Andrzej Panufnik, who was born into the Polish middle class in 1914, died an English knight in 1991 and, in between, led an existence plagued by war, politics and exile that twice stripped him of all he had achieved and forced him to start again.

This year is his centenary, and the event has been celebrated with concerts in Chicago, Warsaw, London and elsewhere. The most personal commemoration comes on Sunday, when his surviving family members present a Panufnik Day at one of London's newest concert halls, Kings Place.

Panufnik's family is a powerhouse of creativity: His widow, Camilla Jessel, is a photographer; his daughter, Roxanna, is a composer; and his son, Jem, is an artist and filmmaker. They have pooled their talents for this commemorative day to tell - in words, music and images, with other performers - the story of Panufnik's roller coaster life.

The tale begins in Warsaw in the 1930s, where the teenage Andrzej showed extraordinary promise and won fame with a piano trio whose lyricism and structural clarity established two enduring elements in his creative makeup.

Then the Nazis invaded Poland. Formal concert life collapsed; Gestapo raids and summary arrests occurred every day. Panufnik's life moved underground, where he wrote Resistance songs and formed a piano duo with his fellow composer Witold Lutoslawski, playing four-hand arrangements of works from Beethoven to boogie-woogie in cafes and bars.

"They were young men not expecting to survive from one day to the next, so they didn't care much what they did," said Jessel, 77. "A lot of this music was banned, and the Nazis cracked down on anything that involved patriotic feeling. It was dangerous."

By the time of the Warsaw Uprising, in 1944, Panufnik had left the city for the Polish countryside. When he returned in 1945, he found that all his manuscripts had been destroyed. His whole work, to that time, had been wiped out.

Painstakingly, he reconstructed some of it from memory, including his "Tragic Overture," which gives musical voice to the sounds of conflict, with an endlessly repeated, four-note rhythm spattering across the score like machine gun fire. By the late 1940s, he had re-established himself at the forefront of Polish music. He nursed two orchestras, the Krakow and Warsaw Philharmonics, back to postwar life. The incoming communist regime, to which he was initially sympathetic, showered him with privilege.

But it was also using him for propaganda purposes, and its approach eventually turned into the sort of cat-and-mouse game that Shostakovich faced in Soviet Russia, alternating praise and censure. Under ever-tightening control in 1950s Poland, Panufnik became, as he later said to his wife, "a stuffed dummy ... they opened and shut my mouth for me." It proved unendurable.

"Whenever he had nightmares about Warsaw," Jessel recalled in an interview, "they involved communists, not Nazis. He said in war you expected to die, but communism got at your head, and that was worse."

Panufnik eventually escaped, under circumstances of high drama that involved car chases and giving the slip to minders, in 1954, via Switzerland to Britain, where he claimed political asylum.

Because he was penniless - he had arrived at ... the age of 39, Jessel said, with nothing more than shirts and scores - his new life was not easy. As he put it himself repeatedly at the time, "I went from being No. 1 to being no one." Although the British musical establishment was initially welcoming, things changed - probably, Jessel said, because "the Poles were making mischief."

"Back home, they erased his name from the record," she said. "He became a nonperson. But overseas, it seems to be the case that government agents spread rumors about him being dishonest and untrustworthy, designed to damage his reputation and lose him support.

"I've never quite got to the bottom of it all, but it certainly affected people's judgment," she said.

Apart from politics, there was an issue with Panufnik's music, itself. British ears during the 1950s and '60s were in thrall to modernism and complexity. Panufnik favored lyricism and simplicity, with crystal-clear economy of style, in which short motifs build into repeating patterns - based, he often said, on the paper cutouts with which Poles traditionally decorate their homes.

No doubt it seemed naive and folksy. Certainly it kept him off the radio when a hard-line modernist named William Glock took charge of music broadcasting at the BBC. Panufnik was feeling isolated and ignored when his future wife, an attractive woman half his age - a debutante from an impressively grand English family - entered his life in 1961 and fell in love with him.

"We got to know each other," Jessel remembered, "because someone thought I could help with his correspondence."

They married in 1963 and moved into a handsome house by the Thames at Twickenham. With the help of friends like Yehudi Menuhin, Georg Solti and Leopold Stokowski (who used the Twickenham house as a European hideaway), Panufnik's life turned around.

"Once the children were born," Jessel said, "he started writing fluently again. It was roots going down." The outpouring of work made him almost as much an English composer as he was a Polish one. Eight of his 10 surviving symphonies were written in England and explain why, just before he died in 1991, he was awarded a British knighthood.

"People in Poland always ask if he felt himself British in the end," Jessel said. "And, of course, they never knew much about him there, except for hostile propaganda. But thanks to the centenary, the Poles now want to know. They've realized his place in 20th-century history and want explanations. So I get bombarded with questions: Why did he leave? What happened in England? Did he belong?"

The answer to that final question has to be: up to a point. Despite the knighthood, which took many by surprise, Panufnik was an emigre who never totally adapted. Almost every score looked back to Poland, either as a love letter to its ancient past or a grief note for its troubled present.

In the 1980s, there was a bassoon concerto, commissioned by a Polish group in Milwaukee, lamenting the murder of the Warsaw priest Jerzy Popieluszko, and a symphony in support of Solidarity.

"Although I could not stand shoulder to shoulder with my compatriots," he said in an interview that was rebroadcast by the BBC, "at least I could join them through my music."

Influenced by these preoccupations, vividly expressed in honest, straightforward terms, Panufnik's music may have seemed too simple for mid-20th-century modernists. But now, in a postmodern era comfortable with Minimalism and accepting of musical experience from Adams to Xenakis, different rules apply. Jessel believes her husband's moment has come.