No classical composer in recent memory, not even the inescapable Philip Glass, has had a commercial success to rival that of the late Polish master Henryk Górecki. In 1992, the Nonesuch label released a recording of Górecki’s Third Symphony, subtitled “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs,” which had been written in 1976. When d.j.s at the British radio station Classic FM began playing the disk on a weekly basis, it became an unlikely mainstream hit, and went on to sell more than a million copies. Ritualistic, mesmeric, melancholy, enveloping, the Third supplied sonic ambience in many a home that otherwise lacked classical trappings. It has appeared on movie soundtracks—Maurice Pialat’s “Police,” Peter Weir’s “Fearless,” Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life” and “To the Wonder”—and has been sampled or echoed in various pop songs, including Lamb’s “Gorecki,” which, in 1997, reached No. 30 on the British singles chart.
Górecki profited from the popularity of the Third, and was able to build a house in the area of Zakopane, a town at the foot of the Tatra Mountains, in southern Poland. Yet he was skeptical of the frame in which his work was being received. His friends and associates report that he disliked modern pop culture, and, to a great extent, modernity itself. “He was very angry about the surroundings of contemporary life,” his publisher, Andrzej Kosowski, recalled. “He kept saying that we watch too much television, pop music can destroy our lives, there are too many dangerous things around us.” For the most part, he avoided the spotlight, seldom travelling outside of Poland. The triumph of the Third was one that he neither sought nor exploited.
For years, Górecki was said to be writing a sequel to his most popular work. At his death, in 2010, the promised symphony remained unfinished, but it was complete in sketch form, and indications for orchestration were precise enough that Górecki’s son, Mikołaj, was able to fashion a convincing full score. The London Philharmonic gave the première last year, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, under the sure-handed direction of Andrey Boreyko, performed it at Disney Hall earlier this month. It is a remarkable document: at once a cogent, self-sufficient musical narrative and, possibly, a coded critique of the mode of listening that had helped to make a phenomenon of the Third. All told, it is a commanding, haunting farewell—one that deserves, but is unlikely to receive, the cult fame accorded to its predecessor.
Górecki belonged to a phalanx of composers that came to the fore after the Second World War, testing the limits of artistic expression in Communist Poland. Other representatives of this courageous vanguard were Witold Lutosławski, Andrzej Panufnik, Grażyna Bacewicz, and Krzysztof Penderecki; only the last still lives. They helped to create a Polish new-music culture that remains furiously active, as I reported on a visit to Warsaw last year. Younger Poles such as Paweł Szymański, Paweł Mykietyn, and Agata Zubel carry on a tradition of sonic extravagance, of fearless lunges toward extremes, whether at the consonant or dissonant end of the spectrum.
Górecki’s early works were among the wildest of their era. The First Symphony, subtitled “1959,” inhabits a space between the tightly coiled serialism of Pierre Boulez and the more expansive gestures of middle-period Lutosławski. Fortissimo eruptions coincide with pianissimo meditations, in a back-and-forth that would become a mainstay of Górecki’s style. Even more striking is the Second Symphony, a tribute to Copernicus, which pivots from a brutally dissonant opening section to a liturgically chanting climax. But the composer’s early masterpiece is the orchestral monolith “Refrain” (1965), which ought to be as familiar as György Ligeti’s otherworldly soundscapes of the same period. Here, Górecki reveals his flair for generating almost unbearable tension within apparently static structures.
In “Three Pieces in Old Style,” from 1963, Górecki moved in a quite different direction, adopting a stripped-down, archaically tonal voice. Before Arvo Pärt, even before Terry Riley, Górecki took up certain hypnotically looping patterns that would come to be associated with minimalist music, broadly defined. The Third Symphony, which had its première in France, in 1977, grew from the sound world of the Three Pieces and the “Copernican” Symphony’s finale. A lamentation of the ravages of war, the work is centered on a heartrending text that was found scratched on the wall of a Gestapo torture chamber in the Tatra Mountains. Three movements unfold in grave, glacial paragraphs, with wavelike climaxes accumulating and receding and gathering again. There is no doubt of the symphony’s nobility and weight, yet it has always left me a little cold. The arcs of emotion feel too precisely calibrated: each listener seems primed to experience the same epiphanies at the same moments.
Górecki remained enamored of those sorrowful chanting lines, but he refused to recycle the formula. The dissonances that had temporarily retreated in the Third Symphony made a return in a 1979 setting of “Beatus Vir,” for chorus and orchestra. The Third String Quartet, “…songs are sung,” completed in 1995, takes up relatively simple-seeming, lyrical materials and subjects them to strenuous elongation, until they assume an alien, tormented character. The fact that Górecki withheld that quartet for a decade before finally releasing it to the Kronos Quartet, his longtime advocates, suggests a conflicted relationship with the mass public that had gathered around him.
The Fourth Symphony is a conscious summing-up; the ailing composer may have sensed that it would be his valediction. The subtitle, “Tansman Episodes,” invokes the Polish-born twentieth-century composer Alexandre Tansman; the initial theme, heavy on the notes A, E, and E-flat, is derived from the letters of Tansman’s name. (In German, E-flat is called “Es.”) The opening, reminiscent of the first section of the Second Symphony, is cold, stony, relentless, with three bass-drums whalloping the ears at regular intervals; and when the organ thunders the notes E-flat and G-flat, grating against the prevailing A-minor tonality, the mood turns fearful, as if judgment were being rendered from on high. At the L.A. Phil performance, Hurricane Mama, the Disney Hall organ, filled the role persuasively.
After an almost torturous repetition of these elements, a turn toward a stereotypically “Górecki-like” hymn for low strings makes one think that a contrasting, consoling second movement is under way. Indeed it is, and yet the onslaught of the opening immediately resumes: roaring organ, thudding drums, and the rest. There is something insolent, even punkish, in the gesture. The composer lures his listeners into a trap created by his familiar style, and proceeds to clobber them. Eventually, the symphony is able to escape into a sustained lyrical episode, but a traumatized atmosphere lingers: you keep waiting for more blows to fall.
No less curious is the third movement, a faster-tempo episode in the nature of a scherzo. Jaunty, a little vulgar, with oompah rhythms in the brass, it sounds like an intrusion from another realm, almost like something out of Nino Rota’s soundtracks for Fellini. (Similar dance episodes appear in Górecki’s aggressively idiosyncratic Concerto-Cantata, among other pieces.) In the middle section of the scherzo, the orchestra falls silent except for cello, violin, and piano, who present a yearning, keening episode that, in its inability to develop beyond a few set patterns, starts to sound desperate, ridiculous, even demented. As Ben Hong, the L.A. Phil’s assistant principal cellist, threw himself eloquently into his part, I caught a couple of his colleagues smiling at each other. Again, Górecki could be goading his audience, giving it what it wants until it can take no more. In light of what we know about the composer, however, all this is probably in earnest: the desperate insistence is most likely his own.
The fourth movement begins with a folkish, dancing variation on the principal Tansman theme, at times inebriated and hysterical in mood; then, inevitably, the Savonarolan utterances of the first movement return. A hushed, Amen-like sequence, centered on A major, suggests that the symphony could fight its way to a brighter point of arrival, as did its predecessor, which ends in radiant A major. It goes halfway toward the light: after a floor-rattling bass-drum crescendo, the entire orchestra lands on a quadruple-forte A-major chord. But it is cut off quickly, and could just as well be the sound of heaven’s door swinging shut. Thus does a reluctant celebrity take his leave.
