Symphony No. 3.
“Symphony of Sorrowful Songs”.
The Second Movement.
Composed by: Henryk Górecki.
Available on YouTube at
Polish Composer.
Photo: 1993.
Source: Scanned from Polish Monthly Magazine "Studio".
November/December 1993. Page 8.
Author: Lech Kowalski and Włodzimierz Pniewski.
(Wikimedia Commons)
English: State Flag of Poland with Coat-of-Arms.
Symbolic version.
Based on Image:Flag of Poland.svg
Polski: Flaga Polski z godłem, wersja symboliczna. Oparta na Image:Flag of Poland.svg i Image:Herb Polski.svg. Uwaga: godło użyte w tej grafice nie jest oficjalne. Oficjalna wersja godła nie jest jeszcze dostępna w formacie wektorowym, stąd zamieszczono poniżej dodatkową wersję tej grafiki w formacie PNG, w której użyto poprawnego wizerunku godła.
Date: 26 June 2007.
Source: Own work.
(Wikimedia Commons)
Henryk Górecki was largely unknown outside Poland until the Mid- to Late-1980s, and his fame arrived in the 1990s.[12] In 1992, fifteen years after it was composed, a recording of his Third Symphony, Symphony of Sorrowful Songs — recorded with soprano Dawn Upshaw and released to commemorate the memory of those lost during The Holocaust — became a worldwide commercial and critical success, selling more than a million copies and vastly exceeding the typical lifetime sales of a recording of symphonic music by a 20th-Century Composer.
As surprised as anyone at its popularity, Górecki said: “Perhaps people find something they need in this piece of music [...] somehow I hit the right note, something they were missing. Something somewhere had been lost to them. I feel that I instinctively knew what they needed”.[13]
This popular acclaim did not generate wide interest in Górecki's other works,[14] and he pointedly resisted the temptation to repeat earlier success, or compose for commercial reward.
Apart from two brief periods studying in Paris and a short time living in Berlin, Górecki spent most of his life in Southern Poland.
