Sorrowful songs: Henryk Górecki, 1933-2010
When radio stations started playing Henryk Górecki's Symphony no. 3, known as the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, it was reported that drivers would pull off the road because the haunting, mournful music left them in tears. A 14-year-old Swedish burn victim wrote to Górecki to say that the Third Symphony was what kept her alive. The 1992 Elektra Nonesuch recording of the work, with American soprano Dawn Upshaw singing the soprano part, sold over a million copies and climbed to the top of the classical charts in both the U.S. and the U.K.
The composer, who died November 12 at the age of 76, was not known well outside his native Poland until his success with the Third Symphony. Written for orchestra and soprano solo, the work is a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. The theme is the separation of a mother from her child. It draws on the words a girl had written on a prison wall in southern Poland: "Oh Mamma do not cry—Immaculate Queen of Heaven support me always."
Early in his career Górecki wrote dissonant, avant-garde music that was not always received well by critics and was despised by the communist regime in Poland. By the mid-1970s he shifted to a more minimalist style, often writing with sacred themes and drawing on Polish folk music and church music. He came to reject the dissonant, 12-tone serialism that he had absorbed in his own training, favoring romantic but sparse sounds and the chantlike repetition of musical motifs. His later minimalist style is often associated with contemporaries like Olivier Messiaen (with whom he studied), Arvo Pärt and John Tavener, although he himself felt greater affinity with Bach, Mozart, Haydn and Schubert.
Górecki's most important choral work is Miserere (1981), written for an eight-part a cappella chorus. It was a response to the events of March 1981, when government militia attacked a demonstration by members of Rural Solidarity. Like much of his work, Miserere is a slow, meditative piece. It contains but five words: "Domine Deus noser, miserere nobis" (Lord our God, have mercy on us).
