Music is the expression of emotions and feelings. My ideal is a composition in which poetic content is combined with perfection of musical craft. Poetry by itself does not make a work musically significant, just as craftsmanship by itself threatens falling into the trap of producing dead and dry formulae. Eternal beauty is born only out of a balance of both these elements.

This artistic creed, formulated by Panufnik in 1952, remained valid for him until his final compositions. Neither his changing personal fortunes, nor the evolution of his own musical language, made him abandon that ideal, the embodiment of which was for him the music of Mozart. Like that great classical master, Panufnik tried in his works to preserve the balance between feeling and intellect, the heart and the brain.

Panufnik has his own individual place among twentieth-century composers. What he achieved was to build an original world of sound through transforming, but not rejecting, the existing music tradition. He did not belong among those avant garde musicians who tried to build a new order on the ruins of the old world and burn all the bridges behind them. Instead, he created his own, twentieth-century world of sound, while preserving traditional values, such as melody, harmony and also – beauty of sound, beauty of musical expression. He created an individual musical style and remained indepenent in his compositional ideas, resisting musical fashions of his day.