Symphony No. 3 (Górecki)
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Henryk Mikołaj Górecki composed his Symphony No. 3, Opus 36, Symphony of Sorrowful Songs (a translation of the Polish title Symfonia pieśni żałosnych), in Katowice, Poland in 1976. Premiered at the French Royan Festival on April 4, 1977, motherhood and separation through war are the dominant themes, the first and third movements written from the perspective of the parent, the second from that of the child.
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[edit] Overview
[edit] Instrumentation and score
The Symphony No. 3 is composed in a neo-modal style, and constructed around simple, meditative harmonies, with each movement building slowly through a canon, folded around a single recurring motif.
The symphony is written for solo soprano, four flutes, (two of them doubling on piccolo), four clarinets, two bassoons, two contrabassoons, four horns, four trombones, harp, piano and strings. A typical performance of the work lasts about fifty minutes.
The third symphony continued Górecki's move away from the experimental, dissonant serialism of his earlier work, and is a further progression towards the harmonic minimalism that has characterized his more recent work.
[edit] Movements
The work consists of three elegiac movements, each prefaced 'Lento' (indicating a slow tempo marking in musical terminology):
- Lento - Sostenuto tranquillo ma cantabile
- Lento e largo - Tranquillissimo
- Lento - Cantabile semplice
The first movement, at twenty-six minutes, equals the combined lengths of the second and third movements, and is based on a late fifteenth century Marian lament from the Lysagora Songs collection of the Holy Cross Monastery. Comprising three thematic sections, it opens with a canon in ten parts of a 24-bar melody in the Aeolian mode on E, beginning with the basses; the succeeding entries are spaced by one extra measure (every 25 bars), and each starts a modal fifth above the other. After this canon reaches its full ten voices, it then works its way back to a single pitch. The text lies in the second section, and the soprano soloist builds to a climax on the final word, at which point the strings burst in with the climax of the opening canon. The third section acts as a very long denouement, once again winding down to a single pitch.
The nine-minute second movement is written for soprano, with a libretto formed from a prayer to the Virgin Mary found inscribed on a cell wall in the basement of the Gestapo's Zakopane headquarters, signed "Helena Wanda Blazusiakówna 18 years old, imprisoned since 26 September 1944". The soprano voice is dominant, supported by strings that ache until a final resolution, a chord held without diminuendo for over two minutes.
The third movement is taken from an Opole folk song and again the subject matter is a mother's prayer for a son, lost this time to war. The tempo of this movement is not as slow as the previous two and subtle changes in dynamism and mode make it a deceptively complex and involving piece.
[edit] Critical and popular reception
The symphony was first recorded in Poland in 1978; in the late 1970s and early 1980s, recordings and performances of the work were widely panned by the press outside of Poland itself. A 1985 French film, Police, used the third movement in its end credits; following this, the work was repackaged as a "soundtrack" to the movie and sold well, though it gave little additional information about the piece. Starting in the late 1980s, the symphony began to get increasing airplay on US and British classical radio stations, including BBC Radio 3.
A recording with the London Sinfonietta, conducted by David Zinman and featuring the soloist Dawn Upshaw, was released in 1992 by Elektra - Nonesuch and sold over a million copies worldwide; this recording climbed to #6 on the UK pop album charts and while it never hit the US Billboard Top 200 album charts, it topped the classical charts for 38 weeks[1]. At least a dozen recordings have subsequently been issued after the success of the Nonesuch recording.
Stephen Johnson, writing in A Guide To The Symphony (edited by Robert Layton), wondered whether the commercial success of the work was "a flash in the pan" or would turn out to have lasting significance.
[edit] Trivia
British Industrial music band Test Dept excerpted parts of the symphony in concert performances in the 1980s.
A passage from the first movement of this symphony was used in Julian Schnabel's movie Basquiat and in the final scenes of Peter Weir's 1993 movie Fearless.
The symphony was sampled for the song "Gorecki" by the Manchester trip-hop act Lamb.
[edit] References
- ^ Luke Howard, "Motherhood, Billboard, and the Holocaust: Perceptions and receptions of Górecki's Symphony No. 3", Musical Quarterly 82 (1998) 131-159.
