It is not every day that a music historian is allowed to root around a composer's house, and not every day that such an exploration unearths something that recalibrates our perspectives on a composer's creative preparations. This was my good fortune in September 2002, during the 45th ‘Warsaw Autumn’ festival. Thanks to Nicholas Reyland, who had obtained permission from Lutosławski's stepson, Marcin Bogusławski, we were given free rein for three days to look at, photograph and make a record of any books, scores or other materials that pertained to his compositional life. At the end of this privileged access to his house at Śmiała 39, we put together a pile of materials, including loose sketches and the materials described in this chapter, that we recommended should be added to the already extensive Lutosławski holdings at the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel.

Lutosławski's house had changed little in the eight years since his death. The downstairs reception area still had its L-shaped sofa and whisky chest, and the upstairs study was much as photographs depicted it in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, with the exception of the grand piano, which had been moved out by Lutosławski's widow in 1994 and replaced by their bed so that she could sleep where he had composed. The house has since been somewhat remodelled downstairs, the contents of his study filleted to accommodate other books, new furniture and modern technology, and the carpet that he ordered in London at the time of the premiere of the Cello Concerto in 1970 – and over which he paced between desk and piano for the rest of his life – has been replaced. But the desk remains as it was, its contents including batons and twenty hand-drawn cardboard rulers, some doubleedged, with different gauges.

The bookshelves contained a wide range of scores, books on music, fiction and philosophy. Of particular interest to me were his conducting scores, many heavily thumbed, and his collection of poetry. This included Jean- Louis Bedouin's anthology La poésie Surréaliste (1964, reprinted 1970) which sadly had disappeared by 2013, so possibly the only record of Lutosławski's annotation of Desnos's Les espaces du sommeil, which I photographed in 2002, is to be found in the article ‘One Last Meeting: Lutosławski, Szymanowski and the Fantasia’.