Гёрекiнiң Қайғылы Әндер Симфониясы

Symphony by Henryk Gorecki

The Symphony No. 3, Op. 36, also known as the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs (Symfonia pieśni żałosnych), is a symphony in three movements composed by Henryk Górecki in Katowice, Poland, between October and December 1976. The work is indicative of the transition between Górecki's earlier dissonant style and his later more tonal style and "represented a stylistic breakthrough: austerely plaintive, emotionally direct and steeped in medieval modes". It was premièred on 4 April 1977, at the Royan International Festival, with Stefania Woytowicz as soprano and Ernest Bour as conductor. A solo soprano sings Polish texts in each of the three movements. The first is a 15th century Polish lament of Mary, mother of Jesus; the second a message written on the wall of a Gestapo cell during World War II; and the third a Silesian folk song of a mother searching for her son killed by the Germans in the Silesian uprisings. The first and third movements are written from the perspective of a parent who has lost a child, and the second movement from that of a child separated from a parent. The dominant themes of the symphony are motherhood, despair and suffering. Until 1992, Górecki was known only to connoisseurs, primarily as one of several composers from the Polish School responsible for the postwar Polish music renaissance. That year, Elektra Nonesuch released a recording of the 15 year old symphony performed by the London Sinfonietta that topped the classical charts in Britain and the United States. It has sold more than a million copies, vastly exceeding the expected lifetime sales of a typical symphonic recording by a 20th century composer. This success, however, has not generated similar interest in Górecki's other works.

The nine minute second movement is for soprano, clarinets, horns, harp, piano, and strings, and contains a libretto formed from the prayer to the Virgin Mary inscribed by Helena Błażusiakówna on the cell wall in Zakopane. The orchestra returns to A minor before a final postlude in A major. The 1977 world première at the Royan Festival, Ernest Bour conducting, was reviewed by six western critics, all of them harshly dismissive. Heinz Koch, writing for Musica, said that the symphony "drags through three old folk melodies (and nothing else) for an endless 55 minutes". Górecki recalled that, at the premiere, he sat next to a "prominent French musician", probably Pierre Boulez, who, after hearing the twenty one repetitions of an A major chord at the end of the symphony, loudly exclaimed: "Merde!" The symphony was first recorded in Poland in 1978 by the soprano Stefania Woytowicz. It was deemed a masterpiece by Polish critics, although, during the late 1970s and early 1980s, recordings and performances were widely criticised by the press outside Poland. The symphony drew hostility from critics who felt that Górecki had moved too far away from the established avant garde style and was, according to Dietmar Polaczek (writing for Österreichische Musikzeitschrift), "simply adding to the decadent trash that encircled the true pinnacles of avant gardism".

In 1985, the French filmmaker Maurice Pialat featured a section of the third movement in the credits of his film Police. When the work was later repackaged as a "soundtrack album", it sold well. Although Gorecki's name was featured prominently on the front cover, the sleeve notes on the back provided little information about the work, and Górecki's name appeared in smaller type than those of the main actors. In the mid 1980s, the British industrial music group Test Dept used the symphony as a backdrop for video collages during their concerts to express sympathy with the Polish Solidarity movement, which Górecki also supported (his 1981 piece Miserere was composed in part as a response to government opposition of Solidarity trade unions).

During the late 1980s, the symphony received increasing airplay on US and British classical radio stations, notably Classic FM(From 1992). The fall of communism helped to spread the popularity of Polish music generally, and by 1990 the symphony was being performed in major cities such as New York, London and Sydney. it reached number 6 on the mainstream UK album charts, and while it did not appear on the US Billboard 200, it topped the US classical charts for 38 weeks and stayed on the chart for 138 weeks. The Zinman/Upshaw recording has sold over a million copies, making it probably the best selling contemporary classical record. Michael Steinberg described the symphony's success as essentially a phenomenon of the compact disc. While live performances are still given, they do not always sell out. Some critics, wondering at the sudden success of the piece nearly two decades after its composition, suggest that it resonated with a particular mood in the popular culture at the time. Stephen Johnson, writing in A guide to the symphony, wondered whether the success was "a flash in the pan" or would have lasting significance. In 1998, Steinberg asked, "[are people] really listening to this symphony? How many CD buyers discover that fifty four minutes of very slow music with a little singing in a language they don't understand is more than they want? Is it being played as background music to Chardonnay and brie?" Steinberg compared the success of Górecki's symphony to the Doctor Zhivago phenomenon of 1958: "Everybody rushed to buy the book; few managed actually to read it. The appearance of the movie in 1965 rescued us all from the necessity." Górecki was as surprised as anyone else at the recording's success, and later speculated that "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." At least a dozen recordings were issued in the wake of the success of the Nonesuch recording, and the work enjoyed significant exposure in a number of artistic media worldwide. It was used by several filmmakers in the 1990s and onwards to elicit a sense of pathos or sorrow, including as an accompaniment to a plane crash in Peter Weir's Fearless (1993), and in the soundtrack to Julian Schnabel's Basquiat (1996), in the Netflix series (season 2, episode 7) The Crown, and in Terrence Malick's A Hidden Life (2019). An art gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico opened an exhibit in 1995 dedicated entirely to visual art inspired by the piece. It is also used as one of the songs in the music playlist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research.

In 2017 Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite set the first movement of the symphony as a ballet called Flight Pattern, commissioned by the Royal Opera House. In 2022 she expanded this into a setting of all three movements, Light of Passage.