Henryk Mikołaj Górecki; photo - PAP"This is a large blow not only for our orchestra but for the whole of Polish culture,” Joanna Wnuk-Nazarowa, director of the National Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra in Katowice, musicians who the composer was closely associated with told the PAP news agency.
"This is a great loss,” agrees Antoni Wit, director of Poland’s National Philharmonic. “Many times when I travel abroad I am asked to include one of his works in the programme.”
He would be aged 77 in three weeks’ time. The announcement was made at 11.30 by Polish Radio 2, which interrupted its regular programming and continued with the Third Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, the work which made Gorecki world famous in the early 1990s.
Last month, Górecki received the Order of the White Eagle, Poland’s highest state distinction.
Born in the village of Czernica near Rydułtowy in Silesia in 1933, he started studying music at the age of 19. Three years later he enrolled at the State Higher School of Music in Katowice to study composition with Boleslaw Szabelski.
In the mid-1950s - at the time of the post-Stalinist cultural thaw - he found himself at the forefront of the Polish avant-garde.
He also explored the folk music traditions in such works as Three Pieces in Old Style (1963) and Old Polish Music (1967-¬69).
His early pieces show a development from the folk-influenced worlds of Szymanowski and Bartok to more modernist techniques. The simple yet monumental style for which he came to be renowned became fully established in the 1970s, with such works as Symphony No. 2 ‘Copernican’ (1972), Symphony No. 3 (1976) and the Psalm setting Beatus vir (performed in Kraków to mark Pope John Paul II’s visit to Poland in 1979).
In the early 1980s, following the imposition of martial law in Poland, Górecki withdrew from public life and concentrated on choral settings, sacred music and chamber works.
International bestsellerIn the 1990s, the recording of his Third Symphony, written twenty years earlier, achieved unprecedented international success, becoming the most popular recording of a work by a contemporary composer (thanks to a Nonesuch CD by the London Sinfonietta under David Zinman, with Dawn Upshaw as soloist).
Twenty five years ago, Gorecki’s music attracted new performers and audiences in the West. This led to the composition of three strong quartets, Already it is Dusk (1988), Quasi una fantasia (1991) and Songs are Sung (2005), all of them commissioned and premiered by the Kronos Quartet from San Francisco.
Górecki pursued a teaching career for many years, as a faculty member of the Music Academy in Katowice n 1968-1979, and its Rector in 1975-79. He received numerous honorary doctorates, including those from the Academy of Catholic Theology in Warsaw, Warsaw University, the Music Academy in Kraków, the Catholic University in Washington, the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Victoria University in Victoria, Canada, and the University of British Columbia in Montreal.
Henryk Mikołaj Górecki used to spend much time in his beloved Tatra foothills.
He is survived by his wife, Jadwiga, a pianist, and two children: the daughter Anna who has developed a successful career as a pianist and the son, Mikołaj, who is also a composer.
(mk/pg)