by Reg Didham
Henryk Mikolaj Górecki was born on 6 December, 1933 in Czernica, near Rybnik, Silesia. After studies with Szabelski at the Katowice Conservatory and with Messiaen in Paris, he began to write important, prize-winning compositions whose styles could be seen to be traveling through different influences, all the while increasingly exemplifying the composer's own unique voice. In his article in The New Grove, published in 1980, prior to the composition of both of the works on tonight's program. Bohdan Pociej still makes several cogent observations about Górecki's earlier works that apply equally well here.
Compositions such as these are made up of sound masses of different weights, volumes and densities, of explosions, frictions and conflicts, of flashes and signals.In referring to an orchestral piece called Canticum Graduum from 1969, Pociej makes some observations that, by extension to choral writing, shed some light on the Miserere:
…[It] is marked by a seeming lack of action. It is a chain of related sounds, conventional chords …and these merge and pass through each other; there is a suggestion of the chorale and …of organ registration.Miserere was originally composed in 1981 and revised in 1987 for the world premiere, which was given on 10 September 1987 in Wloclawek, Poland. It is Górecki's direct and personal response to a sit-in on 19 March 1981. In his notes for a recent recording of the work, Adrian Thomas describes what happened:
Following a sit-in at the headquarters of the United Peasant Party in Bydgoszcz by members of Rural Solidarity, some 200 members of the militia burst in on the demonstrators. In the ensuing violence, when the protesters were forced to run the “path of health” of militia batons, over 20 union members were injured, several of them very seriously.The piece was written without any expectation of a performance at the time, but simply as a response to this latest act of state terrorism. Over five years later, it became possible to perform the work, and a performance in Bydgoszcz followed the world premiere by one day. The piece's structure is quite simple: that of a great, sonic arch. The “cornerstone” of that arch, one might say, is the note A, and the key of A minor. Each of the eight choral parts enters in turn over a twenty-five minute period with a different melody. As the lower parts continue, rather than insisting on their original melodies, their lines are subtly changed to fit with each newly introduced line above. At the climax of the piece, the number of parts increases from eight to ten, from which point the piece rapidly lessens both its dynamic intensity and the sheer density of its harmonies. This prepares the listener for the first entrance, after almost thirty minutes, of the central text of the work, “Miserere nobis.” In simple, slow-moving, six-part writing, the composer resolves all the tension he has created up to now with a setting of the words that, until now in his country's history, had been forbidden. This structure and even some of the melodic lines used are clearly related to several of the composer's most important earlier works, especially the Third Symphony and some of the choral pieces of the 1970's. There is also a strong influence of twentieth-century minimalism to be heard. But the work itself is clearly the heartfelt response of an artist to his people's continuing political and personal agony.