Polish composer of film music best known for Bram Stoker's Dracula, Death and the Maiden, and The Pianist
Very few 20th-century classical composers set out with the intention of writing music for films. Wojciech Kilar, who has died of cancer aged 81, was no exception. Would he ever have dreamed, when he was studying composition in Poland, that he would later go on to score more than 100 films and build his reputation on that body of work rather than in the concert hall? It took Kilar more than 30 years of composing music for Polish films before he became internationally recognised because of his creepy score for Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), directed by Francis Ford Coppola.
The acclaim that Kilar accrued from his music for Coppola's pyrotechnical horror movie led to work on other widely shown English-language films, such as Jane Campion's The Portrait of a Lady (1996) and three by Polish-born Roman Polanski: Death and the Maiden (1994), The Ninth Gate (1999) and the Oscar-winning The Pianist (2002).
Kilar was born in Lviv, a former Polish city now in Ukraine. A few years after his birth, he moved with his doctor father and actor mother to Katowice, the city in southern Poland where he spent most of his life. He graduated from the state music academy there, and from what is now the Academy of Music in Kraków before spending a year in Paris studying with the teacher Nadia Boulanger in 1959.
First, under the influence of Igor Stravinsky, Kilar's early works were in the neo-classicist style. They then gradually moved into the serialism of the followers of the Second Viennese School such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, Luciano Berio and Luigi Nono. One of his own potent examples was Riff 62 (1962), a 12-tone work for large orchestra. But in the early 1970s, like his fellow Poles Krzysztof Penderecki and Henryk Górecki, Kilar abandoned his avant-garde ambitions and adopted a far less astringent style drawing from Polish folk music, medieval Polish chants and the Catholic liturgy.
Much of what is labelled "minimalist music" usually consists of a few simple ideas that are relentlessly pursued, but one of Kilar's earliest works in that mode, the symphonic poem Krzesany (1974), is not without emotional range and lyricism.
Perhaps it was the minimalist aspects of Kilar's musical output – dramatic, uncomplicated, melodic and repetitive – that lent it to enhancing or complementing the image on screen. He was able to enter into the spirit of the films, sometimes copying other classical styles, without compromising his own sound world. In fact, it could be argued that, unlike his devotional concert works, his film scores are more varied and chromatic.
About a dozen of Kilar's scores were written for the feature films of Krzysztof Zanussi, including Illumination (1973) and Revisited (2009), most often realised on the piano with long notes in the strings, gently hinting at depths beneath dialogue. Zanussi described his collaboration with Kilar as "a kind of semantic interpretation, where the music steps up to the level of dialogue in the scene. It enriches the sense of what is being shown."
Kilar wrote music for films by other leading Polish directors including Andrzej Wajda, such as The Promised Land (1975) and Chronicle of Love Affairs (1986). "Andrzej Wajda is a dream director for me, because he gives me creative freedom," Kilar said. "Thanks to that, the composer feels as a co-creator of the film. Wajda wants to have music that is not only fulfilling the function of the background, or is merely added to the image, but that also has artistic value in itself, that is alive beyond the film."
Kilar's threateningly turbulent score for mixed choir and orchestra, with growling cellos, immediately established the brooding gothic theme of Coppola's Dracula. "One day, at 3am, Coppola called me with a proposal to write the music," recounted Kilar. "Of course I agreed, and this for two reasons. Because I like and appreciate his cinema, which in the language of film means image, movement, action, great passions. And secondly, it can't be denied – quoting The Godfather – it was an offer I couldn't refuse."
In contrast to Dracula, Kilar created a pastiche baroque tune on the woodwinds for The Portrait of a Lady. For The Pianist, he based much of the score on Jewish themes befitting the film's subject. One of Kilar's most effective scores was for The Ninth Gate, which features a vocalisation by the soprano Sumi Jo. An example of the way Kilar's music works is evident in an early scene when Johnny Depp is looking at books in the commonplace setting of a library. A few chords on the piano, gradually moving into full orchestra, suggest that something menacing is going on under the surface of the image.
But Kilar's attitude to his film work was ambivalent. "If I need metaphysics, I don't go to the movies, it's just enough for me to reach to my bookshelf, for Pascal, St Thomas Aquinas, or simply the scriptures." In the meantime, he continued to compose for the concert hall, employing a simplified musical language in which sizeable masses of sound and voices would reflect the composer's devout Catholic faith: Exodus (1981) – part of which was used in the trailer of Schindler's List (1993) – Angelus (1984) and Te Deum (2008) being the most typical examples.
Kilar's political views were as conservative as his concert music; he was a supporter of the rightwing Law and Justice party.
His wife, Barbara, a pianist, died in 2007, after more than 40 years of marriage.
• Wojciech Kilar, composer, born 17 July 1932; died 29 December 2013