Henryk Górecki Symphony of Sorrowful Songs Kilanowicz Wit

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Alt. Symphony no. 3 • Henryk Mikołaj Górecki - Trzecia Symfonia: Symfonia pieśni żałośnych • Performance: • Soprano - Zofia Kilanowicz • Conductor - Antoni Wit • Orchestra - Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra • Timestamps: • 0:00 - I. Lento sostenuto tranquillo ma cantabile • 27:18 - II. Lento e Largo tranquilissimo - etc. • 37:35 - III. Lento cantabile - semplice • Art: • I. The Pieta - William Adolphe Bouguereau • II. The Prisoner - Joseph Wright • III. The Enigma - Gustave Doré • The Symphony: • The symphony of sorrowful songs, as Górecki describes it, is fundamentally a piece about motherhood, which as a phenomenon is almost ubiquitous among humans. Beyond the little kernel of ourselves that we can never separate from our mothers, we all share in the experience of motherhood somehow whether immanently, distantly, or through the sometimes thin threads of memory. For roughly half of us, we experience it only from its warm, radiant effects, but the other half can both receive its effects and be the brightly burning epicenter of this great and powerful wonder. Despite its ubiquity and its nearness of heart to all but the most unfortunate of us, to fully describe motherhood in a positive way is almost impossible because there is simply too much data for a finite human mind to grasp such an enormous mystery. • In the light of the tragic history of the Opole region of Poland, Górecki set about to write a piece to transcend the concrete empirical events of this region and bind them to the experience of human motherhood. Given the vantage point of history, it makes sense to link these events to motherhood in a privative or negative way. In each of the songs, the mother is separated from her child, and the perspective shifts first from a grieving mother to an imprisoned girl and back to a mother who has lost her child. As a consequence, we learn more about the essence of motherhood from the pain experienced in war. It makes us wonder what this thing is and how valuable and irreplaceable a human experience it is that it can inspire such misery and tragic longing, tear open such an untreatable wound, and empty the world of all color and meaning in the very instant that it is taken away. • I. Lento sostenuto tranquillo ma cantabile - Theologically, this lament takes on a starkly different character than one would expect from the whole of the Christian tradition. Mary knows Christ is the Messiah, but her heart is unable to bear his death despite his promises to rise again. In the text, she forgets at that moment all the grand, beautiful promises to restore Man to God and is lost in the loss of her son. Mary is the queen of the universe and the womb who contained the uncontainable, but here in the text, she is also a mother witnessing her son's death. And even all of the hope of heaven cannot fill the void that tears itself into her heart from the sight of her dying son. • II. Lento e Largo tranquilissimo - etc. Really only Górecki's words are adequate to describe these words which were scratched into the wall of a gestapo prison by an 18 year old girl: I have to admit that I have always been irritated by grand words, by calls for revenge. Perhaps in the face of death I would shout out in this way. But the sentence I found is different, almost an apology or explanation for having got herself into such trouble; she is seeking comfort and support in simple, short but meaningful words. In prison, the whole wall was covered with inscriptions screaming out loud: 'I'm innocent', 'Murderers', 'Executioners', 'Free me', 'You have to save me'—it was all so loud, so banal. Adults were writing this, while here it is an eighteen-year-old girl, almost a child. And she is so different. She does not despair, does not cry, does not scream for revenge. She does not think about herself; whether she deserves her fate or not. Instead, she only thinks about her mother: because it is her mother who will experience true despair. This inscription was something extraordinary. And it really fascinated me. • III. Lento cantabile - semplice. True historical grief can be felt most concretely in this movement that follows a mother searching for her son following the Silesian Uprisings. Strangely enough, it is here in this most concrete description that the pang of loss is felt the most and the most about the abstract motherhood is revealed. The dark, towering clouds that one imagines hovering over a damp, muddy Silesian field are pierced by that nurturing ray that is called down by this grieving mother's prayer for blossoming flowers and singing birds to do the one thing that she desires to do more than anything yet will never be able to do again as long as she lives on the Earth - that is to take care of her son. • Subtitles are available for the English lyrics, and they are pinned in the comments below.

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