Until the day he died, this past November 12th, two days before my birthday, I had not heard, nor heard of, Henryk Gorecki. One of the latest words in Polish music, his most popular work, the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, I’ve heard now, an amazingly apt gift from someone who doesn’t know me that well, and yet …. Anyway, as someone familiar with grief, I was struck by the perfection of the title before having heard a note, or the sense of the title, because the title itself, the words, display an alliteration all too pop—minimalist classical music is anything but pop. But then, this title is a translation, and the sound is different, of course, in Polish, even if the sense is much the same, Symfonia piesni zalwosych. The sibilance is more textured, more zh than s, embedded and unstressed: symFONya PYESHni zhaVAsich.
The first movement: the slow, sway of the double bass chanting down a dim monastic arcade at twilight. The second: the soaring lament of a girl imprisoned by the Gestapo. The third: the sopranic lullaby of a mother for her son killed in war, the rocking, the rocking in a cradle of arms. As if she were trying to awaken him. Then the letting go.
Polish aesthetics feature sorrow, almost begin with it in 1580 with Jan Kochanowski’s Laments. Sorrow becomes Poland, almost swamps it in blood in the 20th century, but artists like Gorecki know better than to become their own or their country’s sorrow, exhibit a certain common sense in not succumbing to it. However large a part of life, however hammered the steel, woe is not the whole of it.
