Henryk Mikołaj Górecki ( 6 December 1933 – 12 November 2010) was a Polish composer of contemporary classical music. According to critic Alex Ross, no recent classical composer has had as much commercial success as Górecki. He became a leading figure of the Polish avant-garde during the post-Stalin cultural thaw.
His Anton Webern-influenced serialist works of the 1950s and 1960s were characterized by adherence to dissonant modernism and influenced by Luigi Nono, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Krzysztof Penderecki and Kazimierz Serocki. He continued in this direction throughout the 1960s, but by the mid-1970s had changed to a less complex sacred minimalist sound, exemplified by the transitional Symphony No. 2 and the Symphony No. 3 (Symphony of Sorrowful Songs). This later style developed through several other distinct phases, from such works as his 1979 Beatus Vir, to the 1981 choral hymn Miserere, the 1993 Kleines Requiem für eine Polka and his requiem Good Night.
Górecki was largely unknown outside Poland until the late 1980s. In 1992, 15 years after it was composed, a recording of his Symphony of Sorrowful Songs with soprano Dawn Upshaw and conductor David Zinman, 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. Commenting on 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.”
Dawn Upshaw (born July 17, 1960) is an American soprano. She is the recipient of several Grammy Awards and has released a number of Edison Award-winning discs; she performs both opera and art song, and her repertoire spans Baroque to contemporary.
Many composers, including Henri Dutilleux, Osvaldo Golijov, John Harbison, Esa-Pekka Salonen, John Adams, and Kaija Saariaho, have written for her. In 2007, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.
Dawn Upshaw was born in Nashville, Tennessee. She began singing while attending Rich East High School in Park Forest, Illinois and was the only female ever promoted to the top choir (the Singing Rockets) as a sophomore, according to choir director Douglas Ulreich.
Helena Wanda Błażusiakówna (born 4 February 1926, died 25 July 1999) was a Polish girl whose prayer, scratched on a cell wall during arrest by Nazis in 1944, was set to music by Henryk Górecki in his Symphony No. 3 Sorrowful Songs.
She was born in Szczawnica, a town in the far south of Poland only half a mile from the border with Slovakia, and was a member of the Góral (“mountain dweller”) community, which spanned the border with Czechoslovakia in the Tatra mountains.
Eight weeks after her capture, on 22 November 1944, Błażusiakówna was being transported by the Nazis by train, and was one of 12 people rescued by guerrillas. She walked over the mountains to Nowy Targ, where she was given a skirt and a large scarf. That evening she was back with her grandparents in Szczawnica. She fell ill and spent the rest of the war in hospital, where the staff took great risks to treat her and hide her identity.
She was a brave young woman who fought in the underground resistance against the German occupiers.
The Success of Henryk Gorecki and Dawn Upshaw’s Recording
How a Somber Symphony Sold More Than a Million Records In 1989, the record executive Robert Hurwitz attended a London performance of the Polish composer Henryk Gorecki’s Symphony No. 3, subtitled “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs.”
“I was just completely knocked out,” he said in a recent interview. “And somewhere in the first movement, I thought, well, Dawn should do this.” He reached out to the young soprano Dawn Upshaw, who agreed to record the symphony with the conductor David Zinman and the London Sinfonietta for Mr. Hurwitz’s label, Nonesuch.
“I think a lot of people might like this,” Mr. Hurwitz recalled thinking, “and we might sell 25,000 or 30,000 copies.”
That turned out to be an understatement: Within a year of the album’s release in April 1992, it was selling about 10,000 units per day. Ultimately, Mr. Gorecki’s Third sold over a million records, an extraordinary number for an album of contemporary classical music.
