Biography
Władysław Szpilman (December 5, 1911 – July 6, 2000) was a pianist and composer from Poland. After early piano lessons with his mother Esthera, he continued his piano studies in the early 1930s at the Warsaw Conservatory under Aleksander Michalowski and at the Academy of Arts (Akademie der Künste) in Berlin under Artur Schnabel and Kreutzer. He also studied composition with Franz Schreker.
In 1933, Szpilman returned to Warsaw, where he quickly became a celebrated pianist and a composer of both classical and popular music. Szpilman composed many classical pieces, and some popular songs and soundtracks. He also toured Poland accompanying violinist Bronislav Gimpel and on 1 April 1935 he joined Polish Radio, where he worked as a pianist performing classical and jazz music. From 1945 to 1963 Szpilman was director of the Music Department at Polish Radio. During this period he composed several symphonic works and about 500 songs, still popular in Poland today, as well as music for radio plays and film.
Read full biography ↓
In the 1950s he wrote about 40 songs for children, for which he received an award from the Polish Composers Union in 1955. In 1961 he initiated and organized Sopot International Song Festival in Poland and founded the Polish Union of Authors of Popular Music. Szpilman also performed as a soloist and with violinists Bronislav Gimpel, Roman Totenberg, Ida Haendel and Henryk Szeryng. In 1963, Szpilman and Gimpel founded the Warsaw Piano Quintet, with which Szpilman performed worldwide until 1986.
In November 1998 Wladyslaw Szpilman was honoured by president of Poland with a Kommandor Order with a Star of Polonia Restituta. In the same year Szpilman's son Andrzej republished his father's memoirs, first in German as Das wunderbare Überleben (The miraculous survival) and then in English as The Pianist, later made into an award-winning film.
Biography text from Last.fm, available under CC BY-SA.