Düsseldorf

Witold Lutosławski appeared at the Düsseldorf Tonhalle – a concert hall built in an old planetarium – on three occasions, and the first and last concerts were held in a singular political atmosphere.

In 1973, it was here that for the first time behind the Iron Curtain he conducted his First Symphony, which had acquired almost legendary status as a work condemned in Stalinist Poland for its ‘bourgeois formalism’. So it was with considerable surprise that the audience listened to the kind of music which a quarter of a century before had been deemed a threat to the regime… the symbolic collapse of which coincided with Lutosławski’s third concert at the Tonhalle, held on Friday 10 November 1989 – the first day after the opening of the border between East and West Germany. Lutosławski had agreed to meet a group of friends who wanted to travel to that concert from Berlin. Although they set off the previous day, they failed to make it to Düsseldorf on time, standing on the motorway in a tailback of Trabants heading West.