Subtitled ‘A Play with Music’, The Pianist was adapted for the stage and directed by Emily Mann, whose credits include acclaimed Broadway productions such as Murder on the Orient Express or A Streetcar Named Desire.
An original score is by Dutch concert pianist Iris Hond.
Ukrainian-Russian Jewish actor Daniel Donskoy appears as the eponymous hero.
The work recounts Szpilman’s war-time experience including his miraculous survival in the ruins of Warsaw in the final months of the war thanks to the help offered to him by his Polish friends and a German Army officer.
For Emily Mann, work on The Pianist was a very personal experience. She told the media: “Not only is it a stunning story about the tenacity of the human spirit and the power of art, but it is also deeply personal. Since I was a child, I’ve been haunted by my mother’s family murdered in occupied Poland during The Holocaust. When I went to Warsaw to research The Pianist, I visited the Jewish Cemetery and placed a stone on my great grandmother’s grave. At that moment, I realized I, too, was a Warsaw Jew, and I had to tell this story”.
A graduate in piano performance and composition, Szpilman worked at Polish Radio for four years until September 23, 1939. On that day, he played the last Chopin recital in the studio of Polish Radio, which subsequently stopped functioning as a result of German bombings. He was 28 at the time.
After the war, Szpilman served as director of Polish Radio’s music department for almost two decades and later made world-wide tours with the Warsaw Piano Quintet. His compositional output includes some 500 songs, many of which became hits, and several symphonic works which have remained in the concert repertoire until today. He died in 2000 at the age of 88.
Szpilman’s memoirs were made by Roman Polanski into the Oscar-winning film The Pianist. (mk/pm)