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. It was premièred on 4 April 1977, at the Royan International Festival, with Stefania Woytowicz as soprano and Ernest Bour as conductor. The dominant themes of the symphony are motherhood and separation through war.
About Symphony No. 3 (Górecki) in brief
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. It was premièred on 4 April 1977, at the Royan International Festival, with Stefania Woytowicz as soprano and Ernest Bour as conductor. The dominant themes of the symphony are motherhood and separation through war. 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 lack of harmonic variation in the Third Symphony, and its reliance on repetition, marked a stage in Gó Recki’s progression towards the harmonic minimalism and the simplified textures of his more recent work. To date, it has sold more than a million copies, vastly exceeding the expected lifetime sales of a typical symphonic recording by a 20th-century composer. The work is indicative of the transition between Gowrecki’s dissonant earlier manner and his more tonal later style and represented a stylistic breakthrough: austerely plaintive, emotionally direct and steeped in medieval modes. Until 1992, G Orecki was known only to connoisseurs, primarily as one of several composers from the Polish School responsible for the postwar Polish music renaissance. Despite a political climate that was unfavorable to modern art, post-war Polish composers enjoyed an unprecedented degree of compositional freedom following the establishment of the Warsaw Autumn festival in 1956.
In the 1960s, he continued to form acquaintanceships with other experimental and serialist composers such as Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen. 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 G Tavener under the term \”holy minimalism\”, although none of the composers classified as such have admitted to common influences. In 1973, he approached the Polish folklorist Adolf Dygacz in search of traditional melodies to incorporate in a new work. 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 won a prize at the 1961 Paris Youth Bienniale. He learned of an inscription on the wall of a German Gestapo cell in the town of Zakopane, which reads: ‘Professional poet, I do not know if a ‘professional’ would create such a powerful entity of such terse, despair or despair or the wringing hands: it is just the great grief and sorrow’
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