Witold Lutosławski and the Ethics of Abstraction

Abstract

AbstractScholars have struggled to reconcile the expressive immediacy of Witold Lutosławski's works with his claims that he wrote absolute music. This article seeks a more nuanced understanding of the place of abstraction in Lutosławski's creative practice by exploring connections between his 1981 speeches on artistic ethics and his approach to melodic construction in Chain 2 (1984–5). Lutosławski's words and music both rely on convention, and recycle rhetoric from his past. But these are not their only correspondences. They also engage with a trio of concepts – withdrawal, integrity, and autonomy – that are at the heart of a moral code Lutosławski articulated in response to the volatile political conditions of 1980s Poland. The article thus sheds new light on the entanglement of modernism, ethics, and politics in the late twentieth century, while illuminating what the idea of abstraction may have meant in a particular time and place.