Classy Classical – Henryk Górecki

On occasion, I am in the mood for classical music (gasp!).  Generally, I enjoy it in a live setting and not so much via radio/CD, but there are a few exceptions.  One of those recent finds is a set of 3 pieces by Polish composer Henryk Górecki.

Interestingly enough, I discovered this music by way of a TV series called The Blacklist. At the end of one of the episodes an excerpt from on the pieces was playing and caught my attention. I got online and started searching for a soundtrack from the show, but didn’t think I’d have any luck because it was a TV show and not a movie. But low and behold, there is a website where people can identify songs played in TV shows.  I looked up The Blacklist, Season 1 Episode 17 I believe it was, and there a couple of people had identified the music. Amazing!

From there, it was a simple matter of Spotify and Amazon, and now I have these songs at my fingertips.  Górecki was a Polish contemporary classical composer who composed this piece, his most popular, in the 1970’s.  Here is an excerpt from the Wikipedia entry:

“The work is slow and contemplative, and each of the three movements is composed for orchestra and solo soprano. The libretto for the first movement is taken from a 15th-century lament, while the second movement uses the words of a teenage girl, Helena Błażusiak, which she wrote on the wall of a Gestapo prison cell in Zakopane to invoke the protection of the Virgin Mary.[45]

The third uses the text of a Silesian folk song which describes the pain of a mother searching for a son killed in the Silesian uprisings.[46] The dominant themes of the symphony are motherhood and separation through war. While the first and third movements are written from the perspective of a parent who has lost a child, the second movement is from that of a child separated from a parent.”

Next time you’re in a melancholic mood, sit down with a glass of wine and play Henryk Górecki’s Third Symphony, Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. Let me know what you think.