Sunday Night Special 7… Henryk Górecki’s Symphony No. 3 – ‘Symphony of Sorrowful Songs’

Hello Everyone, my name is Peter Cudlipp. Welcome to another in the occasional series of extra episodes of the Classical For Everyone podcast. Episodes which I am calling Sunday Night Specials.

The name comes from the night of the week when for some of us, the frustrations of insomnia hit the hardest… and for me, and I hope for you, getting lost in some music is a much better thing to do than stare at the ceiling or at a phone screen.

Now I’m not choosing the music with the hope that it will send you to sleep, though it’s fine if it does… this is music to keep you company.  And of course this series is for everyone… but it is perhaps intended a little more for those of you whose sleep has been troubled.

The idea of the special is to play you just one piece, uninterrupted and in its entirety… with a few minutes of background explained at the end of the episode… if you’re interested. But the main thing is to get straight into the music.

Here is Henryk Górecki’s Third Symphony – to which he gave the subtitle ‘Symphony of Sorrowful Songs’. It was written in 1976 and this recording, which popularised the work is from 1992. David Zinman conducts the London Sinfonietta and Dawn Upshaw is the soprano soloist . The work is about 53 minutes long, is in three sections, each one of which features the soprano singing fragments of Polish texts from a variety of backgrounds that have in common a beauty as well as a deep sadness. And the piece starts incredibly quietly.

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I hope you enjoyed that performance of Henryk Górecki’s Third Symphony – the ‘Symphony of Sorrowful Songs’. David Zinman conducted the London Sinfonietta and Dawn Upshaw was the soprano singer.

And now here are a few minutes of background for you. And I have to thank my AI pal Claude for the legwork that I am basing this on.

The Polish composer Henryk Górecki composed his Third Symphony in 1976, at a time when the country was living under Soviet-imposed communist rule and the weight of recent history lay heavily on the national consciousness. Górecki had already moved through several compositional phases — from the aggressive avant-garde experiments of his earlier career to a slower, more stripped-back style rooted in Polish folk melody and Catholic devotion. The symphony grew from a deeply personal engagement with suffering, memory, and the particular sorrows of Polish history and is distinguished by the central part given to texts sung in each of the three sections of the symphony.

The choice of texts is at the heart of the work's meaning. The first section is based on a folk song…"Where has he gone, my dear young son?" (Kajże się podzioł mój synocek miły?), which describes a mother's mourning for a son lost in war, and probably dates from uprisings in Silesia in what is now south-western Poland in the years after WW I

 The second — and perhaps most devastating — uses words found scratched into the wall of a Gestapo headquarters in the Polish town of Zakopane in 1944 by an eighteen-year-old woman. The words were… “Oh Mamma do not cry, no. Immaculate Queen of Heaven, always support me”. The third section sets a fifteenth-century Polish poem in which the Virgin Mary mourns her crucified son.. Gorecki’s subtitle for the work "Symphony of Sorrowful Songs" — seems inevitable.

Mitigating this ‘sorrow’ a little is the fact that the young woman who wrote the words on the Gestapo prison wall was later rescued and survived the war but I haven’t been able to discover whether Gorecki knew that at the time he composed the work.

In the 1990s the symphony became that very rare thing for a work written by a (at the time) living composer of classical music…  a huge popular success. The CD of the recording I just played you sold over a million copies… which was a huge surprise for all involved.

At the time of the recording the Nonesuch label was actually taking a big risk. The estimated break-even point was around 15,000 copies sold — already an ambitious target in a world where 5,000 sales was considered a strong result for a contemporary classical recording. A million copies must have been unimaginable.

Part of it was just some lucky timing. The newly launched Classic FM — Britain's first commercial classical music station,  played the recording in its very first week of broadcasting in September 1992. The audience response was immediate and overwhelming, and the recording raced to the top of the classical charts, eventually reaching number six on the mainstream UK pop charts as well.

The President of Nonesuch, Robert Hurwitz, later recalled that when the first royalty cheque arrived for Górecki, it was in the hundreds of thousands of dollars — and that the composer kept it in his wallet without cashing it for so long that they had to issue a replacement. Possibly the shock of sudden recognition after a lifetime of obscurity was simply too much to absorb.

The symphony’s reputation and ongoing life is one of those examples of the mixed blessings of popular success.

But a critical divide over the symphony began back at its premiere in 1977 at the International Festival of Contemporary Art and Music, in the French town of Royan… and the terms of the debate were set from that first night. One critic said that the symphony "drags through three old folk melodies for an endless 55 minutes," others called it "decadent trash encircling the true pinnacles of avant-gardism," a "non-composition," an instance of "childish new simplicity," The objection was essentially ideological: Górecki had been a card-carrying member of the avant-garde, a composer who had impressed Stockhausen, and his retreat into tonality, simplicity, and folk melody felt to many colleagues like a betrayal. Górecki's own response was characteristically defiant — he said of the symphony that for him it was the most avant-garde piece he had heard at the Festival.

When the recording became a phenomenon in 1992, the critical establishment largely doubled down rather than recanted, and a new line of attack emerged: that the symphony's popularity was itself suspicious, evidence of a dumbed-down audience seeking easy emotional gratification rather than genuine artistic engagement.

Gorecki is not the only contemporary composer to have fallen foul of the classical musical establishment for that most cardinal of all sins... pleasing the audience.

I want to leave the last words to the composer. In the years immediately after the initial success of the Nonesuch recording, the work was somehow lazily assumed to be specifically intended as a memorial for victims of the Holocaust.

But Górecki said of the work, "Many of my family died in concentration camps. I had a grandfather who was in Dachau, an aunt in Auschwitz. You know how it is between Poles and Germans. But Bach was a German too—and Schubert, and Strauss. Everyone has his place on this little earth. That's all behind me. So the Third Symphony is not about war; it's not a Dies Irae; it's a normal Symphony of Sorrowful Songs."

My name is Peter Cudlipp and I hope you enjoyed this Sunday Night Special of the ‘Classical For Everyone’ podcast. There will be a regular episode in the next few days and another Sunday Night Special in perhaps a few weeks. Thanks for listening.