(classical music, 1976)
One afternoon in 1992, a disc jockey at a classical radio station in London played a movement from a symphony by a virtually unknown Polish composer that had been written almost twenty years earlier. The listening audience responded enthusiastically and searched out the record—a performance of the piece featuring the London Sinfonietta and vocal soloist Dawn Upshaw. In a matter of weeks the recording climbed to the top of the classical music charts, and even landed on the pop music charts, eventually selling in excess of a million copies around the world—not usual numbers for a classical recording. The piece was Henryk Górecki’s Third Symphony, which he called The Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. It was unlike anything else he had composed, as his early work had been very modern and experimental and anything but crowd pleasing. This symphony, however, was unabashedly emotional, which is likely the reason for its wide popularity and why some music critics were so slow to warm to it.
Along with Estonian composer Arvo Pärt (also a Christian and a composer of sacred music), Górecki has become known as a “holy minimalist,” due to a style that often features the human voice and is richly sonorous, often repetitious, and mystical in its overall approach and effect. Many listeners testify to how such music opens up their receptivity toward the transcendent, and find that listening to it often produces both inexplicable tears and a quiet exhilaration.
The first movement of The Symphony of Sorrowful Songs opens with a barely perceptible bass melody that repeats slowly and insistently as it grows in volume, evoking a deep well of sadness and grief until, at about the thirteen-minute mark, three piano notes pierce through the growling bass melody almost like the sounding of a bell, and a solo vocalist enters. She sings the text of a fifteenth-century lament of the Virgin Mary over the death of her Son Jesus. The voice is sad and soaring, echoing the emotions Mary must have felt. After the vocal solo, the music slowly fades as the bass melody returns.
The second movement starts with a melody both mysterious and yearning, washing wavelike over the listener as a salve after the intensity of the first movement. But when the solo vocalist enters again, it becomes more passionate and insistent. The gentle, lulling beauty of the second movement is in sharp contrast to the subject of its lyrics, which give voice to a prayer invoking the protection of the Blessed Virgin that was found scrawled upon the wall of a Nazi prison cell, the probable last words of an eighteen-year-old girl. There is a great sobbing tenderness that enters into the music, and the solo vocalist sings her text in a way that is vulnerable, sorrowful, and yet resilient. It evokes a hard-won hopefulness in the midst of mourning as it crescendos and the strings come alongside to carry the weight of the grief.
The third and final movement is built around an orchestration of a traditional Polish folk song, and it once again presents a lament, this time that of a mother mourning her son, who has been killed in an uprising. There are bell-like tones in the midst of the soulfulness of the sound, and when the movement comes to an end quietly and somewhat inconclusively, it is perhaps a reminder that the pain and suffering of life are always with us, no matter how much hope we have to hang on to.
There is a monumental sense of gravity that permeates this symphony. By using these three texts and setting them to music that expresses deep sorrow as well as the unwillingness of the human spirit to be defeated by that sorrow, Górecki seemed to be striving to capture the universality of mourning and loss as an integral part of the human condition, pointing toward a transcendent peace that does not remove the ache but refuses to give suffering the last word. Surprised by the fame the piece brought him, Górecki wondered aloud if “Perhaps people find something they need in this piece of music. . . . Somehow I hit the right note, something they were missing. Something, somewhere, had been lost to them. I felt that I instinctively knew what they needed.”1
Henryk Górecki was born in 1933 in a bleak industrial town in Poland. As a boy he got little encouragement in music, and was forbidden to play the family piano, though he admits that he would often spend time playing whenever others were away and he had the house to himself. As a young man he studied at the local academy of music, where he developed a reputation for fierce individuality. His first works were in a thoroughly modern, avant-garde style, jangly and frenzied and dissonant, very unlike the Third Symphony for which he became so well known.
These early works scandalized audiences who were unprepared for the dissonance and lack of harmonic center that characterized such music. The Communist authorities who then ruled Poland did not approve, but this did not deter Górecki from continuing his musical experiments. He rejected the stifling tenets of Soviet Realism and insisted on following the path of more adventurous composers whose work he admired. But by the 1970s his music began to be more generally accessible, less aggressive and dissonant, and more introspective and contemplative in nature. He worked for many years as a schoolteacher until his fame reached such a level that in 1975 he became a professor of composition at the State Music School, but once again found himself limited by the interference of Communist Party officials.
In 1978 Górecki was commissioned by Cardinal Karol Wojtya to write a piece to commemorate the nine-hundredth anniversary of the martyrdom of a Polish saint, St. Stanislaus of Krakow, who had become a symbol of the long struggle between church and state in Poland. The piece he composed was a choral work entitled Beatus Vir, and when Wojtya unexpectedly became Pope later that year, the piece was set to be premiered at his first appearance in his homeland. When the government refused to allow Wojtya, now known as Pope John Paul II, to visit his hometown, Górecki abruptly resigned his post in protest. However, years later he was able to personally conduct this sacred piece in the presence of the pope.
In 1981 Górecki composed Miserere as an unaccompanied vocal piece in response to the violent attacks of Soviet authorities on the growing solidarity movement. But he was not allowed by the censors to perform it until 1987, the same year he composed another choral piece, Totus Tuus, an homage to the Virgin Mary written especially for another visit from the pope. While never an outspoken political activist, his compositions certainly played their part in overcoming Soviet dominance in Poland, reminding the people of the strength of a faith that was so often at odds with the atheistic regime.
Growing up in Poland under both the Nazi and Soviet occupations, Górecki always lived in awareness of the pain endured by his beloved native land under a succession of dictatorial leaders. Some of his family had perished in the German concentration camps. He also dealt with pain of his own, including vocational frustrations and disappointments and an ongoing series of health issues, many of them the continuing effects of a serious misdiagnosis and improper treatment he had received as a boy. The gravity and sorrow expressed in his work encapsulate the struggles of his own life and the nightmares experienced by the people of his beloved Poland.
Górecki was a man of deep and sincere faith who, though a bit of a recluse, regularly attended services at his local Catholic church. He was genuinely humble about his accomplishments but also unmoving when it came to approaching music the way he wanted. For him, composing was a way of praying. During his acceptance speech for an honorary doctorate from the University of Warsaw, he spoke with great clarity about the connection between his personal spiritual faith and the music he created:
Struggling with these twelve notes and musical instruments, it’s not so important what I did or how I did it, but what is between and behind the notes . . . that is what matters. Pope John Paul II said at the beatification of Fra Angelico: “His belief became art, which in turn became faith. The art became a prayer.”2
Górecki never attempted to repeat the success of his astonishingly popular Third Symphony by creating a similar crowd-pleasing work. He moved on, largely focusing on choral and liturgical music that drew on his deep love for the music of the ancient church. He was not interested in playing to the tastes of the public and insisted on writing the music he wanted to write. What he wanted to compose was music that found the greatest beauty in simplicity, and the human voice became increasingly the instrument he was most interested in featuring. The resulting works express a universal pathos that is tinged with penitential sorrow and a mystical hope founded upon his deep faith in God. Through his work we journey from darkness into light, and grasp both the depths and the limits of human sorrow while being reminded of God’s eternal triumph over evil.