23/10/2026
Górecki’s Third at Fifty
It is rare these days for an otherwise unknown work of classical music suddenly to become globally famous. It is rarer still for a work of modern contemporary classical music to become so. In the early 1990s, however, the Symphony No. 3 (‘Symphony of Sorrowful Songs’) by Henryk Górecki (1933–2010), did just that.
Composed by someone then largely unknown outside his native Poland, it was completed almost exactly fifty years ago in December 1976. Premiered the following year, it initially received a less-than-favourable reception from some Western critics who thought that Gôrecki had somehow betrayed what was then still considered by many to be the one ‘true’ path for modern(ist) music, by writing something grounded instead in a traditional tonal and modal musical language.
Górecki however, was a composer whose own musical journey reflect the dramatic cultural and political changes of Europe itself over his lifetime. Initially associated with the Post-War musical avant-garde that explored harsh dissonance, unconventional textures and uncompromising modernist techniques, his music later moved towards a more austere and contemplative language that drew on Polish folk traditions, liturgical music, and the expressive power of repetition.
All the same it was still a surprise when, in 1992, a recording of his Symphony No. 3, featuring soprano Dawn Upshaw and the London Sinfonietta conducted by David Zinman, became an international bestseller, indeed becoming reputedly the most successful contemporary classical album ever.
Looking back now, we can recognise several reasons why the work now resonated far beyond its original time and place. That album, itself released height of the CD boom, also had appeared in the same year as the launch of the United Kingdom’s first dedicated classical music radio station, Classic FM. That station became an early champion of both the recording and the work itself. By then Poland too had become something of a global symbol of faith and endurance over suffering, embodied in the appointment of a Polish pontiff (the first non-Italian since the sixteenth century Pope John Paul II, as head of the Catholic Church in 1978, and by the rise what become Eastern Bloc’s largest social movement, Solidarity from 1980.
Górecki ‘s Symphony, which directly deals with themes of loss, remembrance, and resilience, seemed to speak to both to that historical moment and to wider concerns of the emerging post-Iron-Curtain age. And it did so in a way which came across as both uncontrived and yet deeply expressive. Rather than relying on dramatic contrasts or virtuosic display, the symphony instead evokes a minimalist musical frame, asking us to listen patiently and allow small musical changes to gather weight and significance. It is no exaggeration to suggest that the emotional effect can be extraordinary indeed.
While in 1976 such a style of musical minimalism was still quiet radical (Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach had only premiered six months earlier), by 1991 it had become well established as a musical lingua franca with a proven capacity to bridge the so-called ‘classical-popular’ divide and attract broad popular appeal.
The fact that the work, and especially its first movement also has a passing similarity to Samuel Barber’s Barber's Adagio for Strings itself composed another forty years earlier in 1936, suggests that it also taps into a longing I suspect that exists across much of the Western world today for art works that can help us engage in both public and private acts of remembrance in a world otherwise increasingly devoid of formal religious ritual.
Scored for soprano and orchestra, the symphony is built around the setting of words that express the anguish of a mother separated from her child. Its first movement draws on a fifteenth-century Polish lament in which the Virgin Mary mourns her dying son. The second sets words inscribed by an eighteen-year-old Polish woman, Helena Wanda Błażusiakówna, on the wall of a Gestapo prison during the Second World War, pleading with the Virgin Mary not to weep for her. The final movement uses a Silesian folk song in which a mother searches for the body of her son who has been killed in an uprising. All share a universal emotional core: the pain of separation and the enduring bond between mother and child.
On Saturday 14 November, as part of its occasional series of free large-scale vocal and orchestral performances, St Paul’s Cathedral will host a service of music and readings that includes a complete performance of the Symphony, performed by Corpus Medicorum, with soprano soloist Kathryn Zerk. Apart from acknowledging the anniversary of the work itself, the performance also marks Remembrance Day (11 November), the 86th anniversary of the bombing of Coventry Cathedral in England on 14 November 1940, and the fortieth anniversary of the historic visit of Polish Pope John Paul II to the Cathedral in 1986.
Górecki himself was disinclined to tie the significance of the work down to one particular historical event or theme but hoped instead we might find in it a moment of reflection and contemplation for our own troubled times. To that extent, not least, the work remains hugely both tremendously successful and ever relevant.
Performance details
Where: St Paul’s Cathedral, 200 Flinders St, Melbourne VIC 3000
When: 4:00–5:30 pm Saturday 14 November
Free Entry (no tickets required)
(A retiring collection will be made to support the work of the Cathedral)
The performance will also be live-streamed on YouTube.
See https://cathedral.org.au/worship/webcasts-livestream/
