Opio (near Grasse)

Lutosławski made his last private journey before the Iron Curtain fell in the autumn of 1948, travelling to southern France at an invitation from a friend from his schooldays, the brilliant pianist Witold Małcużyński. Unfortunately, he travelled alone, because his wife was not issued a passport. The reason for the rejection was not even the fact that until recently Danuta Lutosławska had French citizenship, and her father had just left Poland, not wishing to live in a communist state. The main problem was the person inviting her, who was in the authorities’ black book for not returning to Poland after the war. Lutosławski spent six weeks in Opio, near Grasse, where the Małcużyńskis rented a house for the summer. From there, they went on a car trip around Provence and the Cote d’Azur. ‘For me, that was an extraordinary, almost exotic experience, particularly when you realise what a contrast it represented to the war years that I’d recently lived through in Poland’, recalled Lutosławski in his obituary of his friend. The two couples would only get to spend the holidays together in 1957.