One of the most important 20th-century composers, Witold Lutosławski has been called by his biographers the “most significant Polish composer since Szymanowski, and possibly the greatest Polish composer since Chopin.” Facile in nearly every genre, his most well-known compositions are for orchestra, particularly his 1941 Variations on a Theme by Paganini and his 1954 Concerto for Orchestra. Lutosławski also composed vocal music throughout his career, starting with exploring Polish folk songs in the 1940s and 50s. As he told clarinetist, author, and conductor Richard Dufallo in 1987, “I’ve always liked the voice and tried to write for voice more humanly—treating the voice as voice and not as an instrument with keyboard.”
Although some of his early vocal compositions are more straightforward, like his 1985 setting of the Christmas carol “The Holly and the Ivy,” after 1960, Lutosławski turned to French surrealist poets for inspiration: for example, the 1963 Trois Poèmes d’Henri Michaux for 20-part mixed chorus, winds, and percussion; the 1975 Les espaces du sommeil, for Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and the Berlin Philharmonic on a poem by Robert Desnos; and written in 1990 and also based on Desnos’s work, Chantefleurs et Chantefables for soprano and orchestra.
Written for friends’ children while Desnos was imprisoned at Theresienstadt during World War II, Chantefleurs et Chantefables provided Lutosławski with wonderful imagery accompanied by a ridiculous quality that matched the composer’s discomfort with the concept of realistic vocal drama. As he told Dufallo, “The only thing that would really fit in my vision of an opera would be something absolutely unreal… that means a fairy tale or Surrealism, absurd, a dream.” Throughout all of the songs, Lutosławski couples incredible, whimsical pictorial details to bring out the text’s surreal elements in a way that feels almost natural. Sleep is a persistent element, as in “La Belle-de-nuit” and “La Véronique” (note the contrabassoon moment in the last line, “but a bull is just a bull”). Particularly noteworthy is “The Angelica,” a completely entrancing slow movement that Lutosławski used as an encore when conducting the work at the BBC Proms in 1991. The cycle ends with “The Butterfly,” but these butterflies have descended to drink broth. Lutosławski employs a rhythmic, ad-lib style to evoke the overwhelming flurry that leaves the town of Châtillon with “no more fat in their broth, but millions of butterflies” instead.