Under the Sign of Sadness: Zbigniew Preisner’s Three Colors Scores

By Tim Greiving

Features—

Feb 7, 2023

Under the Sign of Sadness: Zbigniew Preisner’s Three Colors Scores

Under the Sign of Sadness: Zbigniew Preisner’s Three Colors Scores

By Tim Greiving

Features—

Feb 7, 2023

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Music looms as a spectral presence over Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Blue, White, and Red, collectively known as the Three Colors trilogy. Like the triad of colored lights that bounce on the beautiful, sad faces in the films, Zbigniew Preisner’s multi-hued scores reflect on the images and refract from the inside out. Stern, lonely, and at times almost unbearably passionate, they often penetrate the ears and hearts of the characters. When the grieving heroine of Blue is suddenly overwhelmed by notes from a stoic oratorio, those notes are Preisner’s; when the lost protagonist of Red finds solace in an aria she plays at a record store, the music flowing through her headphones is his. Kieślowski may have written the stories—with the help of screenwriter Krzysztof Piesiewicz and screenplay consultants Agnieszka Holland, Edward Zebrowski, Slawomir Idziak, Edward Kłosiński, and Piotr Sobociński—but Preisner deserves credit for cocreating the trilogy’s mood of existential despair.

“Krzysztof always said that people were born in the positive moon or the sadness moon, and he thought I was born in the sadness moon,” Preisner told me in conversation. “Me too. It was easy communication between us.” Actor Juliette Binoche observed this dynamic between the two men while working with them on Blue. “Krzysztof and Zbigniew really found each other, as they were deeply complementary in their need of emotional expression and spiritual interrogations,” she told me. “It’s probably why I felt close to them.”

There is something spiritual, even liturgical about Preisner’s scores, though God is never mentioned by name in the trilogy. “All my films have a metaphysical or spiritual dimension,” the director said in an interview given fourteen months before he died of a heart attack in 1996 at the age of fifty-four. “But really, it’s not so special: every person’s life comprises those things, to some degree.” The magic of Kieślowski’s cinema lies in the way he suffuses that “not so special”—the quotidian fragments of an ordinary life—with deep poetry, like a white sugar cube slowly dissolving in a cup of coffee. These films frequently hold on close-ups of mundane details, and Preisner works to highlight the sacred meaning of these images.

All three tales snag on the detritus of a modernizing world—the characters are encumbered by telephones, satellite television, and car alarms—but Preisner’s music sounds like it’s emanating out of a cathedral from hundreds of years ago. Drenched in reverb, the instruments Preisner uses—a quivering flute, an isolated guitar—speak in the nostalgic language of ancient lamentations and folk songs. And the music is never mere underscore or Gebrauchsmusik (the German term for “utility music”). It’s deeply idiosyncratic and personal. “I compose music for myself,” says Preisner. “I know my tastes. I know what I want to listen to. I know how I would like to live.”

In Blue, Binoche’s character, Julie, has lost her husband and young daughter in a car crash. Her spouse was a world-famous composer, and his unfinished magnum opus constantly invades her thoughts. The music, composed by Preisner, serves to illustrate her grief, crashing on her in unannounced waves as she sits by a fire eating a piece of blue candy or swims laps in a cerulean pool. For a moment, time stops, and the screen goes black; we experience the musical intrusions as if we were inside Julie’s head. She tries to destroy the score, but a friend says to her: “That music is beautiful. One can’t destroy things like that.”

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“I always felt he was in the work, never outside,” Binoche says of Preisner. “I felt I was in the center of [his and Kieślowski’s] passion for emotion. I was witnessing their companionship, their complicity. There was an ease—laughter and concentration were filling up the room at the same time. They invited me in, and I was taking in all I could.” To play her musically gifted character, Binoche learned from Preisner how to write notation, and also traveled to Poland to hear the music being recorded before the shoot. Binoche says that when the score was played on set, it proved to be “a great companion for acting,” especially given Julie’s solitude for much of the film.

In White, music plays a cheekier, less diegetic, but no less spiritual role. Karol, an impotent sad sack who is dumped by his French wife and stranded in Paris without a visa, returns to his native Poland inside a suitcase, which is then stolen by thieves who beat him up and leave him in a frozen dump. Karol looks around, bloodied and bruised, and exclaims “home at last” as the soundtrack launches into a Chopinesque piano concerto. “Everything was very, very ironic,” Preisner says of the score in White. That tone extends to his main theme: a spirited, tipsy tango that follows Karol on his odyssey from poverty to shady capitalistic success, as he buys up cheap real estate that he knows is about to be developed. When Karol is still in France, he’s haunted by a melancholy clarinet melody that seems to be wafting in from far away. For Preisner, this was a metaphor for the ways in which many Polish immigrants took their homeland with them and refused to assimilate.

The final chapter in the trilogy, Red, is fueled by an insistent bolero, a Spanish dance rhythm that churns in a hypnotic circle. The invisible hand of Fate—or God?—hovers in the background of this story about a fashion model, a retired judge, and a cuckolded young lawyer, and the plot ultimately brings several of the three films’ characters together on the brink of death. They may not literally hear the bolero theme, as Julie can hear the oratorio in Blue, but the music is integrated into the psychic fabric of their story. Like the cyclical motif of the score, the narrative “is a tight circle,” Preisner says, one that mimics the passage from birth to death.

After Kieślowski died, Preisner bade farewell to his collaborator with a grand musical gesture titled Requiem for My Friend. But when Terrence Malick asked to borrow its tearful finale, “Lacrimosa,” in The Tree of Life, he laid it over a sequence of the universe being born. “There was not for me any contradiction,” Preisner says, “because, finally, birth and death are very similar.”

Preisner’s own circle began in a little village outside of Kraków, where he sang in church (he maintains that “the human voice is the best instrument”). He grew up in an intensely Catholic culture that the communist government had sealed off from the rest of Europe. “We had no access to Western music,” he told the Guardian in 2004. “The priest was the most important person in the village, and even the party secretary went to church.” Preisner had no formal musical education, but as a teenager he began performing in a local cabaret. For a composer with such a mystical style, he has an utterly demystified view of composition: “You just have a piece of paper and you write down the music that is in your head.”

Influenced by composer Nino Rota’s work with Federico Fellini, Preisner took a decidedly anti-Hollywood approach when he began scoring movies. “Film music, in my opinion, shouldn’t be an illustration of what we can see on the screen, but should play a metaphysical role,” he told the Village Voice in 2016. “It’s a dramatic axis in the movie.” Kieślowski first encountered Preisner’s work when he saw Antoni Krauze’s 1983 The Weather Forecast, and in the music he heard a kindred spirit. The director then hired Preisner to score his death-themed drama No End. When Preisner surprised the small orchestra he’d hired by asking them to sing parts written for a choir, Kieślowski knew he had a partner for life.

Dekalog (1988) was a pivotal project for the duo. The ambitious television series, consisting of ten interlocking episodes, frequently blurs the line between diegetic and nondiegetic music. In the ninth chapter, a composer named Van den Budenmayer is mentioned, introducing a figure that would go on to become Preisner’s cinematic alter ego. Budenmayer turns up repeatedly in Kieślowski’s subsequent films. In The Double Life of Véronique (1991), the title character dies while singing a doom-laden voice concerto by Budenmayer; later, her doppelgänger teaches the piece to an elementary school band. The deceased composer in Blue is said to have been inspired by Budenmayer, and in Red, Valentine (Irène Jacob) hears a Budenmayer aria from Dekalog in her headphones.

These references to a fictional composer became something of a recurring joke for Kieślowski and Preisner—one they weren’t playing for laughs. The music attributed to Budenmayer vibrates with an old-world, churchy intensity, and provides an emotional catharsis for Kieślowski’s anguished characters. Blue climaxes with a full version of Song for the Unification of Europe—the final masterpiece of Julie’s late husband, purportedly inspired by Budenmayer—featuring text taken from Saint Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, a paean to love. The title of the piece is tinged with political sarcasm: Europe was tragically disunified at the time; Poland wasn’t a part of the European Union; Yugoslavia was mired in war. Kieślowski compared the song and its lofty sentiment to a cake prepared for a wedding that gets called off. “At that moment the cake becomes ironic, bitterly ironic in relation to what had been supposed to happen,” he said. But the cake—the message—is still offered with painful sincerity. “One does not have to treat [the music] as something that loses its value, for it doesn’t in the least. The same words will be just as much to the point for the next couple that comes to the church and unites as they were for the couple that didn’t,” Kieślowski mused. “These words about love continue to be just as valid.”

Even when Preisner’s music is used ironically in Kieślowski’s films, it’s always sincere at its core. Preisner is a melancholy man with a doomy worldview who nevertheless burns with empathy and deep feelings, and the music he’s made since his friend’s death keeps the spirit of their collaboration alive. Preisner’s latest album, co-composed by the Australian singer Lisa Gerrard, is a song cycle about the end of the world informed by the global COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s assault on Ukraine. Preisner has been openly lamenting the inevitable self-destruction of humanity his whole life, yet he’s left a hint of hope in the album’s title: It’s Not Too Late.

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Tim Greiving is a film music journalist in Los Angeles, with regular bylines in the Los Angeles Times, NPR, and the Washington Post. Find him at timgreiving.com.

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