Henryk Górecki, who has died aged 76, was a Polish composer of classical music whose haunting Third Symphony, the Symphony of Sorrows, drew inspiration from an inscription scrawled on a Nazi prison wall during the second World War.
With its themes of war and separation in a slow, stark style, it became a surprise best-seller following a recording released in 1992 and given much airtime by the UK radio station, Classic FM.
The piece uses simple, spare settings of Polish materials – the late 15th-century Holy Cross Lament, the wartime graffiti and a folksong, and melody and words from the Opole region on Poland’s south-west border. This led some to identify in it a new spirituality filling a God-shaped space in an era bereft of previous certainties.
The 1992 recording by the London Sinfonietta under David Zinman, with the soprano Dawn Upshaw, that achieved international acceptance was written more than 15 years earlier in 1976.
Henryk Górecki was born at Czernica, near Rybnik, in Upper Silesia, near Poland’s coalmining area west of Katowice. His father worked in the goods office at a railway station. His mother died on her son’s second birthday, and the subsequent second World War years were made yet bleaker for Górecki by tubercular complications after a fall.
He worked as a teacher for two years after leaving school in 1951 before taking up regular music studies in Rybnik. After composition lessons in Katowice, he spent the last three months of 1961 in Paris, his first sustained release from the isolation of Katowice. But after his return from Paris, he remained mostly in Katowice, dogged by ill health, though he was in West Berlin for nine months in 1973-74 on a scholarship. From 1975 to 1979 he was rector of Katowice’s music school. Polish folksongs became a much more integral source of inspiration for him and were just as important as his attachment to Polish medieval and Renaissance music.
In the 1960s, he continued to write works that developed the frantic activity, percussive attack and new string techniques of Scontri: first in the Genesis cycle of works (1962-63), then in Refren (Refrain, 1965) for orchestra.
The composer’s First Symphony , subtitled 1959 , had deployed with a vengeance the sonic blocks typical of “texture music”. His Second Symphony was commissioned for the 500th anniversary in 1973 of the birth of the Polish astronomer Copernicus. It sets – in Latin, for soprano, baritone, chorus and orchestra – texts drawn from Psalms 136 and 146 and from the introduction of Copernicus’s treatise De Revolutionibus Orbium Caelestium.
Górecki’s embrace of modal materials redolent of their national and religious origins continued with Beatus Vir – psalm settings for baritone, chorus and orchestra…
This personal triumph to some degree offset his treatment at the hands of the communist Party, when he had been airbrushed out of all the records of the Katowice music school for a significant anniversary earlier that year.
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Not everything that Górecki wrote during the last 30 years of his life was directly inspired by his Catholic faith and meditative style. References to a wide range of other musics – from Beethoven to 20th-century popular idioms – became a notable feature of the composer’s later output.
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He once described himself as a recluse. He avoided the limelight yet still upset the authorities in other ways from time to time. In using modernist ideas Górecki demonstrated that it was possible for a late 20th-century composer to write music of individuality and substance while simultaneously achieving unusual success.
