Górecki’s Third Symphony has second coming
Polish composer’s smash hit will anchor Orchestre Métropolitain program
Henryk Górecki is making a comeback. Posthumously, mind you, and more than two decades after his heyday.
But the fact remains that on Friday, the Orchestre Métropolitain under guest conductor Cristian Măcelaru will revive this Polish composer’s Third Symphony, subtitled the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, with soprano Marianne Fiset as soloist. Nineties wardrobe is optional. Billed as a commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, the concert in the Maison symphonique could as easily be promoted as a nostalgia night, bringing back (as it will for some) memories of the strange rise of this slow-moving score to the lofty rank of No. 6 on at least one mainstream U.K. pop chart.
In February 1993 I reported U.K. sales of 5,000 units a day, presumably on good authority. The Elektra-Nonesuch recording by the London Sinfonietta under David Zinman with Dawn Upshaw as soloist had a stranglehold on classical charts on both sides of the Atlantic for many weeks. It is often cited as the bestselling recording ever of music by a contemporary classical composer. The echo of its success was resonant enough to lead Concordia University to confer an honorary doctorate on Górecki in 1998.
The following year — if the Montreal Gazette’s database can be trusted — I made my last column reference to Górecki before 2015. Somehow we failed to pick up an obituary in 2010, when the composer died at 76.
Górecki never completed his Fourth Symphony, although his son Mikolaj (a composer in his own right, who accompanied his father to Montreal in 1998) managed to produce a score from sketches, which received its première in London last year.
A recording is expected in January. A success to rival that of its predecessor is unlikely.
The case of the Third left many critics baffled. The music was quiet, repetitious and monotonously scored, mostly for strings. “A load of gloomy piffle,” snorted Alexander Waugh of the Evening Standard.
The review in the Montreal Gazette was mixed. No friend of the minimalist revolution, I was nevertheless prepared to admit that the 27-minute first movement, with its “sprawling canons for strings on a faintly modal, distinctly Slavic chant” and radiant solo soprano line, created “a simple but powerful arch” that succeeded in suspending time and “luring the consciousness into intense reflection.”
Alas, the spell was broken by the inferior succeeding movements. “By this time,” I argued, “all the minimalist cards have been played.” The review reads in retrospect like the judgment of someone who knew he was not supposed to like the music.
When Górecki visited Montreal, the composer proved to be a cordial enough fellow but something less than a great communicator. Interviews were accomplished through a translator. He often answered big-ticket questions with a shrug.
One question that drew him out regarded his alleged link to minimalism and its subset, holy minimalism.
“I don’t like to have my name associated with Arvo Pärt,” Górecki said, referring to the Estonian composer of highly economical music with a spiritual agenda. “I am not a minimalist. Never was. Probably never will be.”
The “never was” part of his comment was debatable, but had some justification. Górecki started in the mid-1950s as a
harsh atonalist who attracted the notice of Pierre Boulez. It was not a style likely to thrive in Communist Poland.
His Three Pieces in Old Style, in 1963, marked the beginning of his gradual journey back from the orthodox edge of the avantgarde. Folk music and Catholicism became important. The Third Symphony uses as source material a folk song, an inscription on the wall of a Gestapo prison and a 15th-century prayer. All the texts are united by the theme of the separation of parent and child (including the Virgin Mary’s loss of Jesus).
The prison inscription (“No, mother, do not weep”) is the pretext for the war theme of the OM program (which includes Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man and Haydn’s Symphony No. 100 “Military”).
Words are less relevant to the effect of the piece than the hypnotic nature of the music itself. Although it was written a few years before Philip Glass, John Adams and Pärt became headline composers, Górecki’s Symphony No. 3 was declared, retroactively, to be a pillar of the minimalist pantheon.
And thus a masterpiece? Those entrusted to make such judgments on the whole were skeptical. And the work has not established itself solidly in the symphonic repertoire.
Górecki was aware that his crowd-pleasing style left him vulnerable to academic attack from “the people who want me to count to 12, forwards and backwards,” as he put it in Montreal. (He was referring to champions of the 12-tone method of composition.)
The letters he received from real people, he said, were more important than the assessments of the experts.
“People who were not forced to listen to my music, and perhaps listened to it in tragic circumstances. They found something they could identify with. This, for me, is the most satisfying thing.”
The case of the Third left many critics baffled. The music was quiet, repetitious and monotonously scored, mostly for strings.