Henryk Górecki
Nov. 12th, 2010 10:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacSometime in the mid 1980s, DGK, explorer of new and unusual music, showed me an obscure LP he'd picked up out of random curiosity. Packaged as the soundtrack album to a French film called Police, it consisted in fact of a full recording of a modern Polish symphony for soprano and orchestra. Neither on the record album nor anywhere else that he looked was there much information to be had on the work or its composer, one Henryk Górecki.
DGK was astonished and spellbound by the audacity and craft of this music, particularly the first movement, and, unlike with many of his passions, when he played it for me I was too. The movement was a huge structure, well over 20 minutes long, consisting of a dark, tragic, diatonic modal melody that begins in just half of the double basses, and then is slowly overlaid in canon, in a succession of different modes, by the different parts of the string orchestra, going all the way up to the first violins. It reaches a climax and recedes, and then, some 12 minutes in, comes the hush of the magic moment when the soprano enters, singing we knew not what, in Polish. At first, her rising line is restricted to the first four notes of the scale, as if trapped there. Then it starts over with new determination and a dark string accompaniment, and breaks through into the higher notes: one of the most thrilling moments either of us had heard in modern music. The soprano continues her tragic lyricism for just a couple of minutes, reaching an intense climax ... at which point we crash into a return of the top of the modal counterpoint for strings and the entire thing builds down again, just as slowly and with the same dogged determination as it had built up, until there's nothing left but those lower double basses, and then a held note and then silence.
We looked at each other. It was simply made, easily described, none of the fevered complexity that seemed required of modern music ... but it was of unmatched power and intensity, and despite the fact that hardly anything happens, and that slowly, it kept our attention rapt and riveted for the entire length. (And it still does so for me today, every time I listen to it.) Anyone can write simple music, but few can do this. Simplicity wasn't the whole story: it had a subtlety and assuredness all its own. Górecki was like the master craftsman who can fix an entire broken-down engine by just turning one screw ... because he knows which screw to turn.
For years, this marvelous piece of music remained our secret shared passion that hardly anybody else had heard of, like The Lord of the Rings in its early days. When I began to collect CDs a few years later, I found a German import with this work on it, and bought it quickly.
Imagine our astonishment, then, when in 1992 a new recording of it on Nonesuch, a well-known American classical label - conducted by David Zinman, who right around then was introducing me to Michael Torke via another CD I picked up at random - became a monster hit and the toast of the classical world, the first contemporary work to reach the top of the classical charts. The musical equivalent of the Lord of the Rings paperbacks had hit the stands. Suddenly our obscure passion was the talk of the town.
Well, some people were happy. Others weren't. Jim Svejda, notoriously opinionated radio host, appropriated a chapter of a book otherwise devoted to recommending favorite recordings just so that he could denounce Górecki and all his fans. Even the better-informed Michael Steinberg was skeptical. They called the music empty and eventless. What Svejda and other admirers of traditional modernism from, frankly, late Beethoven on, couldn't grasp is that it's not intellectual complexity that makes music great. They've been fooled by the fact that so much great music communicates its quality through the detail of its intellectual processes into believing that that's the only way. But, in fact, what makes music live is emotional intensity. If composers can achieve that through complexity, good for them - though there's far too much utterly arid complex music out there to support a case that this always works - but there are other roads to the same goal, and if they get there, they're just as valid. Górecki, Arvo Pärt, Giya Kancheli, John Tavener, and the infamous American minimalists have taken another, more direct path to emotional communication. Many of them are moved by religious or spiritual feelings and thus connect to earlier composers like Bruckner and Hovhaness who have also been accused of emptiness but inspire passionate devotion in those to whom their music speaks - among whom I am emphatically one.
Like many of his fellows, Pärt in particular, Górecki began his career in the 1950s as an alarmingly noisy modernist. I've heard some of his early music and most of it makes an Awful Dynne. (An interesting exception is an early 60s work called Three Pieces in Olden Style.) Gradually, like many others around that time, he began to find uncompromising modernism to be pointless, and slowly moved to a different path. His Third Symphony, which is the work we're discussing (ignore the previous two, please), premiered in 1977 and got Górecki written off entirely by the avant-garde establishment, leaving him to be rediscovered by Maurice Pialat (the director of Police), DGK, and then David Zinman.
In none of his subsequent work that I've heard has Górecki replicated the kind of formula he created for the Third. Some is beautiful without the overpowering sorrow of the Third. Much of his chamber music includes craggy dissonances in jagged rhythms. Yet, throughout the emotional intensity is always there. Górecki remains the craftsman who knows which screw to turn.
Recently, Górecki, like Pärt, returned to the symphony, a form neither had touched in decades. Pärt's Fourth was premiered by the L.A. Philharmonic and recently recorded by them - it's on my must-get list. Górecki's Fourth was scheduled to be performed this year, but ill health led to delays in completing it. Now I'm not sure if it actually is finished or will ever be performed.
Henryk Górecki, just short of completing his 77th year, died today, November 12, 2010.
DGK was astonished and spellbound by the audacity and craft of this music, particularly the first movement, and, unlike with many of his passions, when he played it for me I was too. The movement was a huge structure, well over 20 minutes long, consisting of a dark, tragic, diatonic modal melody that begins in just half of the double basses, and then is slowly overlaid in canon, in a succession of different modes, by the different parts of the string orchestra, going all the way up to the first violins. It reaches a climax and recedes, and then, some 12 minutes in, comes the hush of the magic moment when the soprano enters, singing we knew not what, in Polish. At first, her rising line is restricted to the first four notes of the scale, as if trapped there. Then it starts over with new determination and a dark string accompaniment, and breaks through into the higher notes: one of the most thrilling moments either of us had heard in modern music. The soprano continues her tragic lyricism for just a couple of minutes, reaching an intense climax ... at which point we crash into a return of the top of the modal counterpoint for strings and the entire thing builds down again, just as slowly and with the same dogged determination as it had built up, until there's nothing left but those lower double basses, and then a held note and then silence.
We looked at each other. It was simply made, easily described, none of the fevered complexity that seemed required of modern music ... but it was of unmatched power and intensity, and despite the fact that hardly anything happens, and that slowly, it kept our attention rapt and riveted for the entire length. (And it still does so for me today, every time I listen to it.) Anyone can write simple music, but few can do this. Simplicity wasn't the whole story: it had a subtlety and assuredness all its own. Górecki was like the master craftsman who can fix an entire broken-down engine by just turning one screw ... because he knows which screw to turn.
For years, this marvelous piece of music remained our secret shared passion that hardly anybody else had heard of, like The Lord of the Rings in its early days. When I began to collect CDs a few years later, I found a German import with this work on it, and bought it quickly.
Imagine our astonishment, then, when in 1992 a new recording of it on Nonesuch, a well-known American classical label - conducted by David Zinman, who right around then was introducing me to Michael Torke via another CD I picked up at random - became a monster hit and the toast of the classical world, the first contemporary work to reach the top of the classical charts. The musical equivalent of the Lord of the Rings paperbacks had hit the stands. Suddenly our obscure passion was the talk of the town.
Well, some people were happy. Others weren't. Jim Svejda, notoriously opinionated radio host, appropriated a chapter of a book otherwise devoted to recommending favorite recordings just so that he could denounce Górecki and all his fans. Even the better-informed Michael Steinberg was skeptical. They called the music empty and eventless. What Svejda and other admirers of traditional modernism from, frankly, late Beethoven on, couldn't grasp is that it's not intellectual complexity that makes music great. They've been fooled by the fact that so much great music communicates its quality through the detail of its intellectual processes into believing that that's the only way. But, in fact, what makes music live is emotional intensity. If composers can achieve that through complexity, good for them - though there's far too much utterly arid complex music out there to support a case that this always works - but there are other roads to the same goal, and if they get there, they're just as valid. Górecki, Arvo Pärt, Giya Kancheli, John Tavener, and the infamous American minimalists have taken another, more direct path to emotional communication. Many of them are moved by religious or spiritual feelings and thus connect to earlier composers like Bruckner and Hovhaness who have also been accused of emptiness but inspire passionate devotion in those to whom their music speaks - among whom I am emphatically one.
Like many of his fellows, Pärt in particular, Górecki began his career in the 1950s as an alarmingly noisy modernist. I've heard some of his early music and most of it makes an Awful Dynne. (An interesting exception is an early 60s work called Three Pieces in Olden Style.) Gradually, like many others around that time, he began to find uncompromising modernism to be pointless, and slowly moved to a different path. His Third Symphony, which is the work we're discussing (ignore the previous two, please), premiered in 1977 and got Górecki written off entirely by the avant-garde establishment, leaving him to be rediscovered by Maurice Pialat (the director of Police), DGK, and then David Zinman.
In none of his subsequent work that I've heard has Górecki replicated the kind of formula he created for the Third. Some is beautiful without the overpowering sorrow of the Third. Much of his chamber music includes craggy dissonances in jagged rhythms. Yet, throughout the emotional intensity is always there. Górecki remains the craftsman who knows which screw to turn.
Recently, Górecki, like Pärt, returned to the symphony, a form neither had touched in decades. Pärt's Fourth was premiered by the L.A. Philharmonic and recently recorded by them - it's on my must-get list. Górecki's Fourth was scheduled to be performed this year, but ill health led to delays in completing it. Now I'm not sure if it actually is finished or will ever be performed.
Henryk Górecki, just short of completing his 77th year, died today, November 12, 2010.
I've seen this film
Date: 2010-11-15 03:34 pm (UTC)