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.Thomas, 163
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.Ellis, David. "Evocations of Mahler " (PDF). Naturlaut 4(1): 2–7, 2005. Retrieved 22 June 2007. 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.Alison Moore, Is the Unspeakable Singable? Henryk Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs and the Ethics of Holocaust Empathy, Portal, Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies, 8 (1) January 2011, 1-17. 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. Because of the religious nature of many of his works during this period, critics and musicologists often align him with other modernist composers who began to explore radically simplified musical textures, tonality, and melody, and who also infused many of their works with religious significance. Like-minded composers, such as Arvo Pärt and John Tavener, are frequently grouped with Górecki under the term "holy minimalism", although none of the composers classified as such have admitted to common influences.
Composition In 1973, Górecki approached the Polish folklorist Adolf Dygacz in search of traditional melodies to incorporate in a new work. Dygacz presented four songs which had been recorded in the Silesia region in south-western Poland. Górecki was impressed by the melody "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 the Silesian Uprisings of 1919–21. Górecki had heard a version of the song in the 1960s and had not been impressed by the arrangement, but the words and the melody of Dygacz's new version made a lasting impression on him. He said "for me, it is a wonderfully poetic text. I do not know if a 'professional' poet would create such a powerful entity out of such terse, simple words. It is not sorrow, despair or resignation, or the wringing of hands: it is just the great grief and lamenting of a mother who has lost her son."
Later that year, Górecki learned of an inscription scrawled on the wall of a cell in a German Gestapo prison in the town of Zakopane, which lies at the foot of the Tatra Mountains in southern Poland. The words were those of 18-year-old Helena Wanda Błażusiakówna, a highland woman incarcerated on 25 September 1944. It read O Mamo, nie płacz, nie. Niebios Przeczysta Królowo, Ty zawsze wspieraj mnie (Oh Mamma do not cry, no. Immaculate Queen of Heaven, always support me). The composer recalled, "I have to admit that I have always been irritated by grand words, by calls for revenge. Perhaps in the face of death I would shout out in this way. But the sentence I found is different, almost an apology or explanation for having got herself into such trouble; she is seeking comfort and support in simple, short but meaningful words". He later explained, "In prison, the whole wall was covered with inscriptions screaming out loud: 'I'm innocent', 'Murderers', 'Executioners', 'Free me', 'You have to save me'—it was all so loud, so banal. Adults were writing this, while here it is an eighteen-year-old girl, almost a child. And she is so different. She does not despair, does not cry, does not scream for revenge. She does not think about herself; whether she deserves her fate or not. Instead, she only thinks about her mother: because it is her mother who will experience true despair. This inscription was something extraordinary. And it really fascinated me."
Górecki now had two texts: one from a mother to her son, the other from a daughter to her mother. While looking for a third that would continue the theme, he decided on a mid-15th-century folk song from the southern city of Opole. Its text contains a passage in which the Virgin Mary speaks to her Son dying on the cross: "O my son, beloved and chosen, Share your wounds with your mother ..." (Synku miły i wybrany, rozdziel z matką swoje rany ...). Górecki said, "this text was folk-like, anonymous. So now I had three acts, three persons ... Originally, I wanted to frame these texts with an introduction and a conclusion. I even chose two verses (5 and 6) from Psalm 93/94 in the translation by Wujek: 'They humiliated Your people, O Lord, and afflicted Your heritage, they killed the widow and the passer-by, murdered the orphans. However, he rejected this format because he believed the structure would position the work as a symphony "about war". Górecki sought to transcend such specifics, and instead structured the work as three independent laments.
Instrumentation and score The symphony is constructed around simple harmonies, set in a neo-modal styleKertesz, Imre. "Górecki's Symphony no.3, 'Symphony of Sorrowful Songs' ". Le Chercheur de traces. Retrieved on 7 July 2007. 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". The work consists of three elegiac movements, each marked Lento to indicate their slow tempi.Han-Leon, Chia. "Symphony No.3, op.36 (1976) ". The Flying Inkpot, 9 December 1999. Retrieved on 22 June 2007. Strings dominate the musical textures and the music is rarely loud—the dynamics reach fortissimo in only a few bars.
The symphony is scored for solo soprano, four flutes (two players doubling on piccolos), four clarinets in B, two bassoons, two contrabassoons, four horns in F, four trombones, harp, piano and strings. Górecki specifies exact complements for the string forces: 16 first violins, 16 second violins, 12 violas, 12 cellos, and 8 double basses. For most of the score, these are in turn divided into two parts, each notated on a separate staff. Thus the string writing is mainly in ten different parts, on ten separate staves. In some sections some of these parts are divided even further into separate parts, which are written on the same staff, so that ten staves are still used for a greater number of parts.
Unusually, the score omits oboes, English horns, bass clarinets, and trumpets. The bassoons, contrabassoons, and trombones play only in the first movement, and only for a few bars (bassoons and contrabassoons: 339–342 and 362–369; trombones: 343–348 and 367–369).
The musicologist Adrian Thomas notes that the symphony lacks dissonance outside of modal inflections (that is, occasional use of pitches that fall outside the mode), and that it does not require nonstandard techniques or virtuosic playing. Thomas further observes that "there is no second-hand stylistic referencing, although if predecessors were to be sought they might be found, distantly removed, in the music of composers as varied as Bach, Schubert, Tchaikovsky, and even Debussy."
I. Lento – Sostenuto tranquillo ma cantabile
Typically 27 minutes in duration, the first movement equals the combined length of the second and third movements,McCusker, Eamonn. "Symphony No.3: Sorrowful Songs ". CD Times. Retrieved on 19 June 2007. 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:
Aeolian on E (double basses, 2nd part) Phrygian on B (double basses, 1st part) Locrian on F (cellos, 2nd part) Lydian on C (cellos, 1st part) Ionian on G (violas, 2nd part) Mixolydian on D (violas, 1st part) Dorian on A (2nd violins, 2nd part) 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'):
Double basses: 2nd part (low E Aeolian) → 1st part (B Phrygian) [canon reduced to 7 voices] 1st violins: 1st part (highest E Aeolian) → 2nd part (high E Aeolian) Double basses (B Phrygian) → Cellos, 2nd part (F Locrian)