Gorecki, Henryk

Gorecki, Henryk
▪ 1994

      Among the soul, pop, rock, and rap recordings on the British best-selling album charts in February 1993, the number six hit was a most surprising selection: Symphony No. 3: Symphony of Sorrowful Songs by Polish composer Henryk Gorecki, played by the London Sinfonietta, conducted by David Zinman, with soprano Dawn Upshaw. The album, reported Elektra Nonesuch, the company that issued it, was more than a British hit—by September it had sold more than half a million copies throughout the world, 150,000 in the U.S. alone; the average classical album, by contrast, sells about 15,000 copies. The success of the disc was more remarkable because Gorecki was a living, breathing composer who had spent most of his life in the sooty industrial city of Katowice in Upper Silesia, seldom leaving home. Suddenly he became an international celebrity, traveling to London, Brussels, and New York City, holding press conferences, and appearing as the subject of a British television special.

      Composed in 1976, the Symphony No. 3 hardly sounds like a conventional pop success. Its three movements are in slow lento and largo tempi and played at quiet dynamic levels. It is based on a modal canon built up from low strings; after its mourning lines slowly mount to organ-like harmonies, the soprano voice enters with pastoral melody, a delicate element of light amid otherwise dark shadows. The texts are Polish lamentations: a 15th-century monastic song, a folk song, a prayer scratched in a cell wall by a girl imprisoned by the Gestapo. The repeated orchestral lines recall, to some listeners, minimalist techniques; Upshaw's performance in particular was highly praised by critics, although praise for the Symphony No. 3 was not universal. Some critics dismissed it as simplistic.

      Two years previously only one Gorecki work, his Monologhi (1960), was available in the U.S.; the Zinman-Upshaw recording, however, was the fourth of the Symphony No. 3, and by 1993 some half dozen other works by Gorecki were available on recordings. It may be no coincidence that widespread interest in Gorecki's music appeared after Poland emerged from five decades of Nazi and then communist rule. Several of his early works were described as symbolic anticommunist protest. Elected provost of the State Higher School of Music in 1975, Gorecki resigned in protest four years later when the government refused to let Pope John Paul II visit Katowice. Gorecki's passport was withdrawn, and he said, "Thereafter, I was treated as though I was dead." Gorecki traveled to Krakow to conduct his choral work Beatus Vir for the pope, and he composed new works for subsequent papal visits to Poland; his Miserere, honoring a Solidarity leader beaten by the militia, was not performed for six years after he composed it in 1981.

      Henryk Mikolaj Gorecki was born in Czernica, near Rybnik, Poland, on Dec. 6, 1933, and studied in Paris and at the Katowice Conservatory. The works of Anton von Webern, Olivier Messaien, and Karlheinz Stockhausen, previously outlawed in Poland, informed Gorecki's often atonal and violent early compositions. A change in his art came in 1963 when, challenged to write simple tunes, he created Three Pieces in Old Style for orchestra. Folk song, medieval music, and his Roman Catholic faith characterized his subsequent work, which frequently was based on tragic themes and was in very slow tempi. "I want to express great sorrow," Gorecki said. "The war, the rotten times under communism, our life today, the starving, Bosnia. . . . This sorrow, it burns inside me." Clearly, in 1993 the world was ready to listen. (JOHN LITWEILER)

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Universalium. 2010.

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