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." This popular acclaim did not generate wide interest in Górecki's other works, and he pointedly resisted the temptation to repeat earlier success, or compose for commercial reward. Nevertheless, his music drew the attention of Australian film director Peter Weir, who used a section of Symphony No 3 in his 1993 film Fearless.
Apart from two brief periods studying in Paris and a short time living in Berlin, Górecki spent most of his life in southern Poland.
Biography
Early years
Henryk Górecki was born on 6 December 1933, in the village of Czernica, in present-day Silesian Voivodeship, southwest Poland. His family lived modestly, though both parents had a love of music. His father Roman (1904–1991) worked at the goods office of a local railway station, but was an amateur musician, while his mother Otylia (1909–1935), played piano. Otylia died when her son was just two years old, and many of his early works were dedicated to her memory. Henryk developed an interest in music from an early age, though he was discouraged by both his father and new stepmother to the extent that he was not allowed to play his mother's old piano. He persisted, and in 1943 was allowed to take violin lessons with Paweł Hajduga, a local amateur musician, instrument maker, sculptor, painter, poet and chłopski filozof (peasant philosopher).
In 1937, Górecki fell while playing in a neighbor’s yard and dislocated his hip. The resulting suppurative inflammation was misdiagnosed by a local doctor, and delay in proper treatment led to tubercular complications in the bone. The illness went largely untreated for two years, by which time permanent damage had been sustained. He spent the following twenty months in a hospital in Germany, where he underwent four operations. Górecki continued to suffer ill health throughout his life and as a result said he had "talked with death often".
In the early 1950s, Górecki studied in the Szafrankowie Brothers State School of Music in Rybnik. Between 1955 and 1960, he studied at the State Higher School of Music in Katowice. In 1965 He joined the faculty of his alma mater in Katowice, where he was made a lecturer in 1968, and then rose to provost before resigning in 1979.