The Symphony No. 3, Op. 36, also known as the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs (), is a symphony in three movements composed by Henryk Górecki in Katowice, Poland, between October and December 1976. The work is indicative of the transition between Górecki's earlier dissonant style and his later more tonal style and "represented a stylistic breakthrough: austerely plaintive, emotionally direct and steeped in medieval modes". It was premièred on 4 April 1977, at the Royan International Festival, with Stefania Woytowicz as soprano and Ernest Bour as conductor.

A solo soprano sings Polish texts in each of the three movements. The first is a 15th-century Polish lament of Mary, mother of Jesus; the second a message written on the wall of a Gestapo cell during World War II; and the third a Silesian folk song of a mother searching for her son killed by the Germans in the Silesian uprisings. The first and third movements are written from the perspective of a parent who has lost a child, and the second movement from that of a child separated from a parent. The dominant themes of the symphony are motherhood, despair and suffering.

Until 1992, Górecki was known only to connoisseurs, primarily as one of several composers from the Polish School responsible for the postwar Polish music renaissance. That year, Elektra Nonesuch released a recording of the 15-year-old symphony performed by the London Sinfonietta that topped the classical charts in Britain and the United States. It has sold more than a million copies, vastly exceeding the expected lifetime sales of a typical symphonic recording by a 20th-century composer. This success, however, has not generated similar interest in Górecki's other works.

In May 2024, a very carefully handwritten copy of the score from the collection of the National Library of Poland, written by the composer himself, was presented to a permanent exhibition in the Palace of the Commonwealth.

Background

Despite a political climate that was unfavorable to modern art (often denounced as "formalist" by the communist authorities), post-war Polish composers enjoyed an unprecedented degree of compositional freedom following the establishment of the Warsaw Autumn festival in 1956. Górecki had won recognition among avant-garde composers for the experimental, dissonant and serialist works of his early career; he became visible on the international scene through such modernist works as Scontri, which was a success at the 1960 Warsaw Autumn, and his First Symphony, which was awarded a prize at the 1961 Paris Youth Bienniale. Throughout the 1960s, he continued to form acquaintanceships with other experimental and serialist composers such as Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen.

During the 1970s, Górecki began to distance himself from the serialism and extreme dissonance of his earlier work, and his Third Symphony, like the preceding choral pieces Euntes ibant et flebant (Op. 32, 1972) and Amen (Op. 35, 1975), starkly rejects such techniques. The lack of harmonic variation in Górecki's Third Symphony, and its reliance on repetition, marked a stage in Górecki's progression towards the harmonic minimalism and the simplified textures of his more recent work. which makes use of the medieval musical modes, but does not adhere strictly to medieval rules of composition. A performance typically lasts about 54 minutes. Ronald Blum describes the piece as "mournful, like Mahler, but without the bombast of percussion, horns and choir, just the sorrow of strings and the lone soprano". Strings dominate the musical textures and the music is rarely loud—the dynamics reach fortissimo in only a few bars. and is based on a late 15th-century lament of Mary from the Lysagora Songs collection of the Holy Cross Monastery (Św. Krzyż Monastery) in the Świętokrzyskie Mountains. Comprising three thematic sections, the movement opens with a canon based on a 24-bar theme, which is repeated several times. The canon begins in 2 parts; then, for each repetition of the theme, an extra part is added, until the canon is in eight parts (with the top two parts doubled at the octave, making for ten voices total), using a 24-bar melody in the Aeolian mode on E. It begins with the double basses, 2nd part, with each succeeding entry occurring one measure later (i.e., a new entry begins every 25 measures), each starting a diatonic fifth above the last. That means that each appearance of the melody in a new part is in a different mode, in this order:

  1. Aeolian on E (double basses, 2nd part)
  2. Phrygian on B (double basses, 1st part)
  3. Locrian on F (cellos, 2nd part)
  4. Lydian on C (cellos, 1st part)
  5. Ionian on G (violas, 2nd part)
  6. Mixolydian on D (violas, 1st part)
  7. Dorian on A (2nd violins, 2nd part)
  8. Aeolian on E (1st violins, 2nd part)

After the 8-part canon is played, it is repeated, with the 1st parts of the 1st and 2nd violins (silent up to this point) doubling the other violin parts an octave higher.

After that, the canon continues, but the voices gradually drop out one by one, from the lowest upwards and the highest downwards; the instruments in question then double, or play the parts of, a higher or lower voice that is still playing, in this order ('→' means 'double/play the parts of'):

  1. Double basses: 2nd part (low E Aeolian) → 1st part (B Phrygian) [canon reduced to 7 voices]
  2. 1st violins: 1st part (highest E Aeolian) → 2nd part (high E Aeolian)
  3. Double basses (B Phrygian) → Cellos, 2nd part (F Locrian)
  4. Cellos: 2nd part (F Locrian) → 1st part (C Lydian) [canon reduced to 6 voices]
  5. 2nd violins: 1st part (high A Dorian) → 2nd part (A Dorian)
  6. Double basses (F Locrian) → Cellos (C Lydian)
  7. Cellos (C Lydian) → Violas, 2nd part (G Ionian)
  8. 2nd violins (A Dorian) → Violas, 1st part (D Mixolydian)
  9. 1st violins (high E Aeolian) → 2nd violins (A Dorian) [canon reduced to 4 voices]
  10. Double basses fall silent
  11. 1st violins (A Dorian) → 2nd violins + violas, 1st part (D Mixolydian) [canon reduced to 2 voices]

The canon ends with all the strings (except the double basses) sustaining a single note, E4.

The soprano enters on the same note in the second section and builds to a climax on the final word, at which point the strings enter forcefully with the climax of the opening canon. The third section of the movement (Lento—Cantabile semplice) is a long dénouement, another canon based on the same melody in the opening canon; but this time it starts with 8 parts (the top two doubled in octaves), and the voices drop out from high to low:

  1. 1st violins: 1st part (highest E Aeolian) → 2nd part (high E Aeolian)
  2. 2nd violins: 1st part (high A Dorian) → 2nd part (A Dorian)
  3. 1st violins sustain an E5 drone
  4. 2nd violins sustain an E4 drone as 1st violins fall silent
  5. Violas: 1st part (D Mixolydian) → 2nd part (G Ionian)
  6. Violas sustain an E3 drone as 2nd violins fall silent
  7. Cellos: 1st part (C Lydian) → 2nd part (F Locrian)
  8. Cellos sustain an E2 drone as violas fall silent
  9. Double Basses: 1st part (B Phrygian) → 2nd part (melody in low E Aeolian)

The movement thus ends with the lower strings, and the piano (briefly recalling the second section of the movement).

Lento e largo—Tranquillissimo

The nine-minute second movement is for soprano, clarinets, horns, harp, piano, and strings, and contains a libretto formed from the prayer to the Virgin Mary inscribed by Helena Błażusiakówna on the cell wall in Zakopane.

The orchestra returns to A minor before a final postlude in A major. The 1977 world première at the Royan Festival, Ernest Bour conducting, was reviewed by six western critics, all of them harshly dismissive. Heinz Koch, writing for Musica, said that the symphony "drags through three old folk melodies (and nothing else) for an endless 55 minutes". Górecki recalled that, at the premiere, he sat next to a "prominent French musician", probably Pierre Boulez, who, after hearing the twenty-one repetitions of an A-major chord at the end of the symphony, loudly exclaimed: ""

The symphony was first recorded in Poland in 1978 by the soprano Stefania Woytowicz. It was deemed a masterpiece by Polish critics, although, during the late 1970s and early 1980s, recordings and performances were widely criticised by the press outside Poland. The symphony drew hostility from critics who felt that Górecki had moved too far away from the established avant-garde style and was, according to Dietmar Polaczek (writing for Österreichische Musikzeitschrift), "simply adding to the decadent trash that encircled the true pinnacles of avant-gardism".

Increasing recognition

thumb|upright=1.3|[[Lemminkäinen's Mother (1897) by Akseli Gallen-Kallela is an earlier evocation of the themes of motherhood and war explored in Górecki's Third Symphony. This work depicts a scene from the Finnish epic poem Kalevala.]]

In 1985, the French filmmaker Maurice Pialat featured a section of the third movement in the credits of his film Police. When the work was later repackaged as a "soundtrack album", it sold well. Although Gorecki's name was featured prominently on the front cover, the sleeve notes on the back provided little information about the work, and Górecki's name appeared in smaller type than those of the main actors.

In the mid-1980s, the British industrial music group Test Dept used the symphony as a backdrop for video collages during their concerts to express sympathy with the Polish Solidarity movement, which Górecki also supported (his 1981 piece Miserere was composed in part as a response to government opposition of Solidarity trade unions).

London Sinfonietta recording and commercial success

During the late 1980s, the symphony received increasing airplay on US and British classical radio stations, notably Classic FM (From 1992). The fall of communism helped to spread the popularity of Polish music generally, and by 1990 the symphony was being performed in major cities such as New York, London and Sydney. it reached number 6 on the mainstream UK album charts, and while it did not appear on the US Billboard 200, it topped the US classical charts for 38 weeks and stayed on the chart for 138 weeks. The Zinman/Upshaw recording has sold over a million copies, making it probably the best selling contemporary classical record.

Michael Steinberg described the symphony's success as essentially a phenomenon of the compact disc. While live performances are still given, they do not always sell out. Some critics, wondering at the sudden success of the piece nearly two decades after its composition, suggest that it resonated with a particular mood in the popular culture at the time. Stephen Johnson, writing in A guide to the symphony, wondered whether the success was "a flash in the pan" or would have lasting significance. In 1998, Steinberg asked, "[are people] really listening to this symphony? How many CD buyers discover that fifty-four minutes of very slow music with a little singing in a language they don't understand is more than they want? Is it being played as background music to Chardonnay and brie?" Steinberg compared the success of Górecki's symphony to the Doctor Zhivago phenomenon of 1958: "Everybody rushed to buy the book; few managed actually to read it. The appearance of the movie in 1965 rescued us all from the necessity." Górecki was as surprised as anyone else at the recording's success, and later speculated that "perhaps people find something they need in this piece of music…. <!--Was that the end of a sentence? I used the required four dots, spaced only to the right; reformat with three dots if there was no period there in the original-->Somehow I hit the right note, something they were missing. Something, somewhere had been lost to them. I feel that I instinctively knew what they needed."

At least a dozen recordings were issued in the wake of the success of the Nonesuch recording, and the work enjoyed significant exposure in a number of artistic media worldwide and became a best-selling and multi-award winning DVD by Tony Palmer, made for The South Bank Show on ITV, and uniquely shown without commercial breaks. It was also used by several other filmmakers in the 1990s and onwards to elicit a sense of pathos or sorrow, including as an accompaniment to a plane crash in Peter Weir's Fearless (1993), and in the soundtrack to Julian Schnabel's Basquiat (1996), in the Netflix series (season 2, episode 7) The Crown, and in Terrence Malick's A Hidden Life (2019). An art gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico opened an exhibit in 1995 dedicated entirely to visual art inspired by the piece.

In 2017 Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite set the first movement of the symphony as a ballet called Flight Pattern, commissioned by the Royal Opera House. In 2022 she expanded this into a setting of all three movements, Light of Passage.

Discography

{| class="wikitable sortable"

|-

!Year

! Soprano

! Conductor

! Orchestra

! Label

|-

| 1978

|

|

| Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra (Katowice)

| Polskie Nagrania 1980, 1993, 2010, 2017

|-

| 1982

|

|

| Radio-Symphonie-Orchester Berlin

| Koch Schwann 1988

|-

| 1985

|

|

| SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden

| Erato 1985, Belart 1993, Apex 2003

|-

| 1987

|

|

| Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra (Katowice)

| Olympia 1988

|-

| 1992

|

|

| London Sinfonietta

| Nonesuch (Warner)

|-

| 1993

|

|

| Polish State Philharmonic Orchestra of Katowice

| Karusell UK 1994

|-

| 1993

|

|

| Kraków Philharmonic Orchestra

| EMI Classics 1995, 1999, HMV Classics 1997

|-

| 1994

|

|

| Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra (Katowice)

| Naxos

|-

| 1994

|

|

| Warsaw National Philharmonic Orchestra

| Philips

|-

| 1994

|

|

| Slovenian Symphony Orchestra

| Audiophile Classics

|-

| 1995

|

|

| Orquesta Filarmónica de Gran Canaria

| Arte Nova

|-

| 2004

|

|

| Adelaide Symphony Orchestra

| ABC Classics

|-

| 2006

|

|

| Sinfonia Varsovia

| Naive V5019

|-

| 2007

|

|

| Royal Philharmonic Orchestra

| Allegro

|-

| 2009

|

|

| Atlanta Symphony Orchestra

| Telarc CD80699

|-

| 2012

|

|

| Danish National Symphony Orchestra

| Sony

|-

| 2016

|

|

| Szczecin Philharmonic

| DUX 1200

|-

| 2018

|

|

| Poznań Philharmonic Orchestra

| DUX 1459

|-

| 2019

|

|

| Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra

| Domino Records

|-

| 2020

|

|

| Genesis Orchestra

| Sony Classical

|}

Notes

Sources

  • Mikołaj Jakub Kosmalski. "Symphony No. 3 «Symphony of Sorrowful Songs» Op. 36 for solo soprano and orchestra by Henryk Mikołaj Górecki. Contribution to the monograph. The verbal layer, the musical structure and verbal-musical connections in the first part - Lento, Sostenuto tranquillo ma cantabile." Master's thesis under the direction of Hab. Dr. Robert Kurdybacha. The Karol Lipiński Academy of Music in Wrocław. Wrocław 2012.