Henryk Górecki. Symphony of Sorrowful Songs

In autumn 1973, Górecki travelled with his wife and two children to West Berlin for a one-year residency with the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) as part of the Artists-in-Berlin Program.[1] The invitation had already been made some time before, but health issues and the birth of his son – Mikołaj Piotr, who would later become a composer – in February 1971 had so far prevented his study trip. Górecki became ill again in Berlin during new year 1973/74 with kidney problems and needed half a year to recover. On his return to Poland, the couple initially decided to move to Warsaw but in the end moved to Katowice, where Górecki had studied at the State Higher School of Music and had later worked as a lecturer. In 1975 he accepted the position as rector at the Music Academy / Akademia Muzyczna w Katowicach, founded in 1929.

Some months already before his stay in Berlin, Górecki had asked Adolf Dygacz (1914–2004), an ethnologist and musicologist who also taught at the Music Academy, about interesting old melodies in his collection, as the British specialist for Polish music Adrian Thomas (*1947) writes in his comprehensive biography about Górecki.[2] Dygacz responded with four songs from Silesia, including a folk song from the Opole area. It is the lament of a mother whose son lost his life during an uprising: “Kajze mi sie podzioł mój synocek miły? / Where has he gone, my beloved son?”[3] While the melody likely originates from the 19th century, the text refers to the Silesian Uprisings from 1919 to 1921. According to Thomas, this song was the beginning of the conception and completion, which took over three years, of Symphony No. 3 (Symphony of Sorrowful Songs / Symfonia pieśni żałosnych / Sinfonie der Klagelieder), Op. 26, for solo soprano and orchestra. “For me, it is a wonderfully poetic text”, explained Górecki in 1977 during a music conference in Baranów Sandomierski. “I do not know if a ‘professional’ poet would create such a powerful entity out of such terse, simple words. It is not sorrow, despair or resignation, or the wringing of hands: it is just the great grief and lamenting of a mother who has lost her son.”

Górecki began composing, yet soon found himself facing what he considered the impossible task of achieving, on the basis of the traditional melody, a harmony as solid as that of his previous pieces. He put the material to one side and looked for other texts that could complement the first set. He found the next text for his future symphony in the book, “Palace. Katownia Podhala” (Palace. The torture chamber of Podhale), by Alfons Filar and Michał Leyko, published in 1970. It describes the atrocities committed by the German Gestapo between 1939 and 1945 in the Hotel Palace in Zakopane, which had been repurposed as a commanding office for the security police. Names and writing scratched into the walls of the cellar prison cells were found after the war. Among these was graffiti by 18-year-old Helena Wanda Błażusiakówna from Szczawnica, who had been imprisoned there since September 1944: “Mamo, nie płacz, nie. Niebios Przeczysta Królowo. Ty zawsze wspieraj mnie. Zdrowaś Mario. / Oh Mamma do not cry, no. Immaculate Queen of Heaven, always support me. Ave Maria”. It partially refers to a Polish resistance song from 1918. In 1977, Górecki commented that he had to admit he had always been irritated by grand words: “Perhaps in the face of death I would also cry out in this way myself. But the sentence I found is different, almost an apology or explanation for having got herself into such trouble; she [the author] is seeking comfort and support in simple, short but meaningful words. I like texts like this: simple and short.” 

While looking for another text with a similar mood, Górecki decided on the fourth verse from “Lament świętokrzyski” (Holy Cross Lament), a Planctus from around 1470, the manuscript of which in the Holy Cross Benedictine monastery on the Łysa Góra mountain in south-east Poland apparently went missing during the Second World War: “Synku miły i wybrany. Rozdziel z matką swoje rany … / O my son, beloved and chosen, Share your wounds with your mother ... ” Górecki commented on this later in his lecture: “This text was popular and anonymous. Now I had three acts, three people. Originally, I wanted to frame these texts with an introduction and a conclusion. I even chose two verses (5 and 6) from Psalm 93/94 in the translation by Wujek: ‘They humiliated Your people, O Lord, and afflicted Your heritage ...’” In the end however Górecki decided against this and kept only the first three laments. 

 

In his early compositions, completed between 1958 and 1960, Górecki had adhered to the minimalism of the Western avant-garde, above all Pierre Boulez (1925–2016), thus distancing himself from the social realism which was fading in Poland at that time.[4] He was representative of New Music and a member of a “completely unique new generation of composers” in front of an astonished audience at the Warsaw Autumn / Warszawska Jesień in 1960, Poland’s largest festival for contemporary music. This was alongside Krzysztof Penderecki (1933–2020), Witold Lutosławski (1913–1994), Kazimierz Serocki (1922–1981) and Tadeusz Baird (1928–1981). His orchestral piece “Scontri”, Op. 17, which premièred at this festival, “became a symbol of Polish avant-garde music.”[5] Thomas writes that, as a pioneer among his fellow citizens, Górecki added larger movements to Boulez’s integral serialism that culminated “extrovertedly” and “eruptively.” Over the course of the 1960s, however, he went his own way, similar to the Estonian Arvo Pärt (*1935). By continuing to serialise tone pitches, dynamics and lengths, he achieved an essentially meditative perception of time and the structural contrasts of melodic blocks and refrains. Slow tempos, dynamic extremes, modal harmonies, frugal textures and an “economic concentration of the material” became characteristic, while the composer also quoted Polish music from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.[6]

At the start of the 1970s, Górecki began his two-decades-long series of a capella choir pieces and compositions for singing voices, choir and orchestra, which reached a first high point as a trilogy: Symphony No. 2 (Op. 31, 1972) and No. 3 (Op. 36, 1976) and “Beatus Vir” (Op. 38, 1979). With Symphony No. 3 he created, with the “most direct technical means” (Thomas), a very personal and expressive emotional lyrical minimalism which was rooted in the composer’s heartfelt Roman-Catholic faith and was unparalleled in Polish music. 

All three of the symphony’s movements are slow, building up “in a constant flow” (Feuchtner) to the introduction of the singing voice. Despite the strong orchestration, it is the strings in particular which determine the musical performance, while the harps and piano add emphasis. The wind instruments intensify the heavy sound effect with sustained notes. E minor, B minor and A minor are the recognisable root keys of the first three movements, even though the score lacks key signatures.[7]

The first movement, lasting approximately 27 minutes, roughly as long as the next two movements combined, contains the extensive Mary lament from the Holy Cross Monastery on Łysa Góra mountain. The instrumental prelude, a calm meditation over a three-tone motif, stretches over the first half of the movement and consists of a precisely structured canon with different instruments. The soprano solo, the Maria lament, emerges heartfelt and dignified. After it ends, the music falls back to the litany of the beginning and presents itself once again as a canon with the same motif. After a short introduction with strings, harp and piano, the singing voice in the now popular second movement (duration: 10 minutes), presents the call of Mary from the Gestapo jail in Zakopane with strings and root notes from the wind instruments. Evoked in sweeping melodic arcs, consisting of a folk melody and another melodic fragment, the singing ends in the two first verses of the Polish Ave Maria. In the third movement (duration: 17 minutes), the sorrow of the mother for her fallen son emerges from variations on a simple motif played by strings, harp and piano. It ends in a coda, “emulating breathing which fades out in comforting chords – the music transforms from modal keys to pure A major. While playing this music requires neither particular virtuosity nor extraordinary technical skill, it does require a spiritual energy and the ability to sustain an arc over a long time frame. It demands surrender and openness from the listener...”[8] Górecki’s minimalism connects here, according to Feuchtner, with a new religiosity that is also directed against the Communist political regime in Poland of that time and that shows solidarity with Catholic resistance.

 

Henryk Mikołaj Józef Górecki was born on 6 December 1933 in the village of Czernica, west of Rybnik in Upper Silesia. His mother, Otylia, came from a mining family in Zabrze and was a passionate piano player. She died young, on her son’s second birthday. Her brother Alfred wrote poems, played the violin, accordion, and composed. The father, Roman Górecki, was employed by the railway, worked on the family’s small farm on the outskirts of Czernica, and was also an amateur musician. After Otylia’s death he married again and built a house in Rydułtowy, where his family came from, using the inheritance of his late wife. This is where Henryk grew up and went to school. Aged ten, he took violin and later piano lessons with a local instrument maker and amateur musician. Soon he began to compose, songs and miniatures initially, and at the beginning of the 1950s he was ready to compose a more extensive sonnet for a string quintet in the style of Arcangeli Corelli (1653–1713). 

After finishing school in 1951, he applied unsuccessfully to study at different music schools and finally decided on a three-year training programme as a primary school teacher. As of 1952, he was able to complete this training in the pedagogic department of the State Music School Rybnik / Państwowa Szkoła Muzyczna w Rybniku and trained there in piano, clarinet and violin as well as in harmony, counterpoint, instrumentation and traditional music. He composed in his free time and in 1955 he applied to the State Music Academy in Katowice with a considerable number of compositions and studied composition there under Bolesław Szabelski (1896–1979), a student of Karol Szymanowski (1882–1937), until 1960. He grew up with Szymanowski and Chopin, he said later. While he had always mostly been interested in Beethoven, Szymanowski and Chopin, he was also interested in Mozart, Schumann, Schubert, Brahms and Bach.[9] With residencies, he travelled to Paris in 1961 and 1963 for multiple-month study trips where he met Boulez, Olivier Messiaen (1908–1992) and Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928–2007). As of 1965, he taught at the Music Academy in Katowice, was then a lecturer from 1972, and full professor as of 1977. He was rector of the Music Academy from 1975 to 1979, eventually leaving this position following permanent interference from Poland’s Communist Party and being sidelined by the political regime.[10]

Górecki composed Symphony No. 3 based on the preliminary work he had done in 1973 between 30 October and 30 December 1976, i.e. during the second year of his rectorship of the Music Academy.[11] The official commission from the Southwest German Radio Symphony Orchestra must have come in spring 1976, around a year before the originally planned première. At this point, the composer was not only internationally well known because of his leading position, but also due to a previously commissioned piece – Symphony No. 2, subtitled “Kopernikowska”. This is an epic piece for a large orchestra with solo soprano, baritone, choir and orchestra, commissioned by the Kosciuszko Foundation in New York to celebrate the 500th birthday of astronomist Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543). It was premièred in June 1973 by the Symphony Orchestra of the Warsaw National Philharmonic / Orkiestra Symfoniczna Filharmonii Narodowej in the Polish capital, yet never achieved the worldwide significance of Symphony No. 3. The third piece in the trilogy is “Beatus vir” for baritone solo, mixed choir and large orchestra. It was commissioned in 1977 by Cardinal Karol Wojtyła (1920–2005), who became Pope John Paul II in 1978, to mark the 900th anniversary of the murder of Saint Stanislaus of Kraków (†1079). It was premièred, in the presence of the Pope, by the local philharmonic orchestra in Kraków in 1979. The commission, composition and première of this piece ultimately led to Górecki’s surveillance by the Communist Party, his expulsion from all official functions of rectorship, and ultimately to his resignation.

Symphony No. 3, the “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs”, was premièred by the Southwest German Radio Symphony Orchestra, based in Baden-Baden, on 4 April 1977 during the 14th International Festival for Contemporary Music in Royan. It was conducted by Ernest Bour (1913–2001), who had been the principal conductor of the orchestra since 1964. Polish singer Stefania Woytowicz (1922–2005) sang the solo part (for the concert programme see PDF 2). She had a large repertoire of contemporary music and had already sung the soprano role in the première of Symphony No. 2. The orchestra, previously known as the Great Orchestra of Southwest German Radio, later as Southwest German Radio Symphony Orchestra, had already specialised in premières of New Music under their previous conductor Hans Rosbaud (1895–1962) and certainly, at the latest, since their first performance at the Donaueschingen Music Days in 1950.

 

The première in Royan was regarded as a complete flop by influential composers, connoisseurs and above all German-speaking critics in avant-garde music. Górecki (Fig. 1), present at the première, later reported that a leading French composer – possibly Boulez – said a clearly audible swearword (“merde”) after the last notes were played.[12] Heinz Koch wrote in the music magazine Musica from the Bärenreiter publishing house in Kassel: “It drags through three old folk melodies (and nothing else) for an endless 55 minutes.” He also categorised the symphony as the “epitome of kitschy saints’ imagery”.[13] Music publicist and arts section editor at the Frankfurter Rundschau, Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich (1938–2018), wrote in the Karlsruhe newspaper Hi-Fi-Stereophonie, the official voice of the German High Fidelity Institute: “This non-composition seemed ‘current’ only because it exposed once and for all the misguided path of a childish ‘New Simplicity’, serving as a stark warning to all who are interested in real musical development.”[14]

Composer and music critic Dietmar Polaczek (1942–2020), head of the music section at Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung since 1976, wrote in the Österreichische Musikzeitschrift that the three texts of Górecki’s music covered up “devout, naive and horrible memories with easily consumable comforting sound” and thus made light of them: “Aside from misappropriating the texts, this piece provokes, albeit unintentionally, in another way: It strays far from the conformity of the avant-garde, [...] but imitators have always surrounded the true pinnacles of avant-gardism with decadent trash. Why should this be any different now?” [15] In Poland however the piece was received with great appreciation. Fortnightly music magazine Ruch Muzychny (Musical Movement) reported from Royan that the symphony was above all sincere and full of noble simplicity.[16] Music critic Józef Kański (*1928) and other Polish colleagues were impressed by Ernest Bours’ confident control, the expressive qualities of the score, and Stefania Woytowicz’s voice.[17]

The Polish première took place on 25 September 1977 at the Warsaw Autumn Festival for contemporary music.[18] The Warsaw Philharmonic National Orchestra / Orkiestra Filharmonii Narodowej w Warszawie played under the conductor Andrzej Markowski (1924–1986). Stefania Woytowicz sang the soprano solo again.[19] Reactions from the audience and expert world were mixed. Warsaw musicologist Ludwik Erhardt (*1934), editor-in-chief of the newspaper Ruch Muzyczny, felt both irritated and bored and claimed that the composer had stepped outside the borders of what we term high art. Tadeusz A. Zieliński (1931–2012), also a musicologist and well-known book author, claimed that the composition contradicted all basic musical traditions and that it lacked emotion, form, sincerity and taste. Others celebrated it as a masterpiece and the work of a genius.[20] In the following years, the symphony was played every year at music festivals in Poland, including in 1978 at the 22nd Warsaw Autumn Festival, 1978 in Poznán at the 19th Music Spring, and in Bydgoszcz at the 17th Music Festival / Bydgoski Festiwal Muzyczny. The English-German journal Polish Music / Polnische Musik published in Warsaw kept the memory of these performances alive for the expert community in the Western world.[21] Stefania Woytowicz regularly sang the soprano part, just as in 1978 in Budapest and 1980 in Yerevan and Tiflis.

 

The first vinyl recording was issued in 1978 in Poland by the Warsaw music label Polskie Nagrania Muza in a recording with the Great Symphony Orchestra of the Polish Radio and Television / Wielka Orkiestra Symfoniczna PR i TV from Katowice conducted by Jerzy Katlewicz (1927–2015) (Fig. 2).[22] However, according to the American musicologist Luke B. Howard, it was a German recording that first helped to make the symphony known worldwide. In 1982, the Pädagogischer Verlag Schwann in Düsseldorf under the label Schwann Musica Mundi issued an LP conducted by the Polish-Australian conductor Włodzimierz Kamirski (1943–2017), recorded in the Jesus Christ Church in Berlin-Dahlem and falsely designated as the “world première”.[23] Woytowicz provided the vocal part for both of these recordings too.

The full recording of the 1977 première was first released in 1985 on vinyl by Erato, the Paris music label for classical and contemporary French music. However, this release was only in connection with the French feature film “Police” (1985) from Maurice Pialat with Gérard Depardieu in the main role, in which parts of Górecki’s symphony were used as the soundtrack (Fig. 3).[24] Although Mark Swed, critic at the Los Angeles Times, called the sensational record cover “one of the dumbest packaging decisions in modern record-business history”,[25] this advertising stunt is likely why Górecki’s Symphony No. 3 became so popular worldwide, especially because the music then received enthusiastic reviews in US music and record magazines such as Fanfare, Opus, and daily newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times.[26] The same recording was released in 1993 by the German record label Belart, owned by Polygram.[27] (Fig. 4). In the following years, numerous re-releases of the already existing recordings were issued by different labels and also on CD. For example, music label Apex released a new digital recording of the première with the Southwest German Radio Symphony Orchestra on CD, still available from Warner Classics (Fig. 5).[28] In the late 1980s, Symphony No. 2 was played, for example, in Braunschweig, Bonn, Rome, Sydney, Adelaide and at various colleges in Minnesota and Virginia. Parts of the symphony were used as a soundtrack for rock groups such as the British industrial band Test Dept for a British TV film about Vincent van Gogh, and in dance theatres in the USA, France and the Netherlands.

However, it was a completely new recording that helped Symphony No. 3 achieve its unexpected worldwide success. In May 1991, US conductor David Zinman (*1936), music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra at the time, made a new recording of the symphony in the Cine-Tele Sound (CTS) Studios in London with the Chamber Music Ensemble London Sinfonietta, which had premièred the piece two years earlier in the British capital with opera singer Dawn Upshaw (*1960) from Nashville. The CD, produced by German pressing factory Warner Music Manufacturing Europe in Alsdorf, was released in 1992 by the label Nonesuch (Fig. 6).[29] It took the Anglo-American pop charts by storm, reaching Number 6 in July 1993 after British classic radio broadcaster Classic FM included this recording in its programme (“one of the DJs played the same excerpt every Saturday morning”[30]). It was number 1 on the Billboard Classical Albums Chart for 37 weeks. In March 1993, German magazine Der Spiegel reported: “For ten years, Górecki’s ‘Symphony of Sorrowful Songs’ barely found resonance and now it suddenly becomes the ‘most notable cult record of all time’ (The Times): Warner Classics ships 8,000 copies daily of the most recent recording of the piece under the prestigious label Nonesuch. Now it has sold over 200,000 CDs.” Górecki has “in the meantime overtaken even Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney”, reported Der Spiegel.[31] It sold better than Madonna, wrote music author Tony Palmer (*1941) in the British YOU Magazine.[32]

 

Print media stylised the composer as the “mythical Górecki”, a formerly apparently completely unknown and obscure Polish composer, a “nobody of the classical realm” that had suddenly “stormed” the British pop charts (Der Spiegel). Howard counted literally hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles of this nature between 1993 and 1996.[33] In 1993 and over the next 26 years, another 27 feature films and television series used the symphony as a soundtrack – from the drama “Fearless” with Jeff Bridges, the artist biography “Basquiat” (1996) by Julian Schnabel, the US Mafia TV series “The Sopranos” (1999 onwards), the documentary film “Chernobyl Heart” (2003), to the action film “Suicide Squad” (2026), and the German-American Nazi war drama “A Hidden Life” (2019) starring German actor August Diehl.[34] Górecki himself was said to have become reasonably wealthy from the record sales, and presumably also from the rights to the soundtracks.[35]

In the world of classical music, Górecki’s Symphony No. 3 has occupied a distinguished place in concert programmes since 1993. In German concert halls, or so it at least appears, it is mostly played at festivals as part of themed concert series or at concerts with a certain focus. The success at the beginning of the nineties was, according to music journalist Jürgen Ostmann (*1962), surely due to the political events in the years before, which had brought Poland to the attention of a wider public: “With the election of Karol Wojtyla (a close personal friend of Górecki) as the Pope, the rise of the Solidarność union and the transformation in the former Eastern Block that started with Poland [...] A public that clearly symbolically linked Górecki’s ‘Symphony of Sorrowful Songs’ to the long history of Polish suffering.” At the same time, music lovers were now connecting the once denounced New Simplicity with the parallel phenomena of US Minimal Music and spiritual minimalism, as characterised by Arvo Pärt and the English composer John Tavener (1944–2013)[36]

At the performance of Symphony No. 3 as part of a concert series “My Polish Heart” in 2018, Polish conductor Krzysztof Urbański (*1982), as of 2015 principal guest conductor of the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra based in Hamburg, referred to the emotional value of the piece and called it “a symphony without music inside” in his introduction. “Górecki minimized the musical aspect in the symphony to [an] absolute minimum. And [in] this way he managed to focus on the emotional aspect of the piece. And most importantly on the text.”[37]. A performance at the Konzerthaus Berlin on 24 May 2020 with the theme “Nostalgia and the Magic of Sound: We are our feelings” conducted by the Russian conductor Andrey Boreyko (*1957) and featuring Polish soprano Iwona Sobotka (*1981) had to be cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic.[38] The fact that the texts of the second and third movement can be used for commemorative days marking the Nazi period and the First World War is certainly another reason to perform Symphony No. 3 in this millennium.[39]

 

Axel Feuß, February 2021

 

Appendix: 

Texts of Symphony No. 3[40] 
 

1st movement

My chosen, beloved son,
Share your wounds with mother;
Because I have always carried you, beloved son,
in my heart
and have always loyally served you.
Speak with your mother,
to make her happy,
even if you are leaving me,
you my dearest hope.

 

2nd movement

Oh Mamma do not cry, no.
Immaculate Queen of Heaven,
always support me.
“Ave Maria”

 

3rd movement

Where has he gone,
my beloved son?
The cruel enemy likely killed him
in an uprising.
Oh you terrible people,
in God’s holy name:
Why have you killed
my son?

Never again,
will he support me,
Even if my old eyes
overflow with tears.

If my bitter tears
could create a second Oder,
they could still not awaken
my son.

He lies in his grave,
and I know not where,
Although I ask people
everywhere

Perhaps the poor child lies,
somewhere in trenches,
and could have just laid
in his warm bed.

Oh sing for him,
God’s little bird,
Because his mother
cannot find him.

And you, God’s little flowers,
bloom all around,
so that my son
can sleep peacefully.

 

Reference literature:

Adrian Thomas: Górecki (Oxford Studies of Composers), Oxford 1997

Luke B. Howard: A Reluctant Requiem: The History and Reception of Henryk M. Górecki’s Symphony No. 3 in Britain and the United States, Dissertation, University of Michigan, 1997

Adrian Thomas: Górecki, Henryk Mikołaj, in: Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Allgemeine Enzyklopädie der Musik, launched by Friedrich Blume, published by Ludwig Fischer, Biographical part 7, Kassel and others, 2nd edition 2002, Column 1357–1360 

Luke B. Howard: Laying the Foundation. The Reception of Górecki’s Third Symphony 1977-1992, in: Polish Music Journal, Volume 6, No. 2 (Henryk Mikołaj Górecki), Sommer, Los Angeles 2003 (original lecture from 5/10/1997 at the symposium “Górecki Autumn” of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles). 

 

Online: 

Biography and works catalogue: Polish Music Center, USC University of Southern California, Los Angeles, https://polishmusic.usc.edu/research/composers/henryk-mikolaj-gorecki/ (2018)

Luke B. Howard: Laying the Foundation. The Reception of Górecki’s Third Symphony 1977-1992 (2003, see Literature), at: Polish Music Center, USC University of Southern California, Los Angeles, https://polishmusic.usc.edu/research/composers/henryk-mikolaj-gorecki/ (1) 

Tobias Ruderer / Hartmut Welscher: Ein Charthit zerfällt zu Staub. Colin Stetson sees the Third Symphony as the work of the recluse that Górecki was (13/4/2016), at: VAN. Webmagazin für klassische Musik, https://van.atavist.com/gorecki-stetson

Anonymous: Verstörte Kaste. Ein Nobody der Klassikbranche stürmt mit einer Sinfonie die britischen Pop-Charts (Der Spiegel 10/1993 from 8/3/1993), https://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-13682237.html

Elisabeth Richter: Wundervolle Mischung. Ein Nachruf auf den polnischen Komponisten Henryk Mikołaj Górecki (12/11/2010), at: Deutschlandfunk Kultur, https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/wundervolle-mischung.1013.de.html?dram:article_id=171149

(All links were last accessed in February 2021)