In the mid-1990s, the Third Symphony, the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, by Henryk Górecki, who has died aged 76, was one of the best-known works by a living composer. It uses simple, spare settings of Polish materials – the late 15th-century Holy Cross Lament, a wartime piece of graffiti and a folksong, the melody as well as the words, from the Opole region on Poland's south-west border – that led some to identify a new spirituality to fill a God-shaped space in an era bereft of previous certainties. Its rediscovery of melody and modality, at broad tempi over generously evolving spans of time, seemed a riposte to the modernism of the preceding 30 years and more.
The 1992 recording of the Third Symphony by the London Sinfonietta under David Zinman, with the soprano Dawn Upshaw, became an international bestseller. A new age – if not actually New Age – of music to nourish the spirit was proclaimed, also detectable in works of the time by Arvo Pärt, John Tavener and others.
Górecki had actually written the work more than 15 years earlier, between October and December 1976. It was premiered by the Symphony Orchestra of Südwestfunk, Baden-Baden, which had commissioned it, under Ernest Bour, with Stefania Woytowicz in April 1977 at the Festival International d'Art Contemporain in Royan, on France's Atlantic coast. Released to the world at one of the last bastions of the very musical avant garde which it was subsequently declared to have helped make redundant, the symphony became an emblem of one sort or another well before its subsequent 15 minutes of serious fame. It is said that the rock group Test Department played part of the work before every concert on a nine-week tour of eastern Europe, and it provided the soundtrack for the Gérard Depardieu film Police (1985).
Górecki was born at Czernica, near Rybnik, in Upper Silesia, near Poland's coalmining area west of Katowice. The composer's father worked in the goods office at a railway station. His mother died on her son's second birthday, and the subsequent second world war years were made yet bleaker for Górecki by tubercular complications after a fall.
He worked as a teacher for two years after leaving school in 1951 before taking up regular music studies in Rybnik. After composition lessons in Katowice with Bolesław Szabelski (1955-60), he spent the last three months of 1961 in Paris, his first sustained release from the relative isolation of Katowice, though he did make visits to the Warsaw Autumn festivals of contemporary music, where his own music was heard as early as the second event, in 1958.
Like his contemporary Krzysztof Penderecki, Górecki took advantage of the relative relaxation of communist control over the arts in Poland in the late 1950s, absorbing as much as he could of the latest activities of western avant-garde composers such as Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Developing out of a broad neo-classicism, Górecki's first mature scores extend, as well as reflect, the serial and post-serial techniques, the dissonant textures and spatial separation of performers typical of the period, realised with special force in the orchestral Scontri (Collisions, 1960).
After his return from Paris, Górecki remained mostly in Katowice, dogged by ill health, though he was in West Berlin for nine months in 1973-74 on a scholarship. From 1975 to 1979 he was rector of the city's music school. Katowice is close to the Tatra mountains, which the composer visited frequently from the time of his marriage to Jadwiga Ruranska in 1959. For Górecki, the folksongs that were an obligatory influence on Polish composers during the early communist years became a much more integral source of inspiration, just as important as his attachment to Polish medieval and Renaissance music.
In the 1960s, however, he continued to write works that developed the frantic activity, percussive attack and new string techniques of Scontri: first in the Genesis cycle of works (1962-63), then in Refren (Refrain, 1965) for orchestra. Refren's use of whole-tone harmony and refrain-based repetition became the starting point for the more straightforward modality and unambiguous expressivity of his later idiom.
The composer's First Symphony, subtitled 1959, had deployed with a vengeance the sonic blocks typical of "texture music". His Second Symphony was commissioned for the 500th anniversary in 1973 of the birth of the Polish astronomer Copernicus. It sets - in Latin, for soprano, baritone, chorus and orchestra - texts drawn from Psalms 136 and 146 and from the introduction of Copernicus's treatise De Revolutionibus Orbium Caelestium. This historical perspective was taken a stage further by Old Polish Music for orchestra (1969), which integrates early Polish sources more thoroughly than do the Three Pieces in Old Style (1963).
Górecki's embrace of modal materials redolent of their national and religious origins continued with Beatus Vir – psalm settings for baritone, chorus and orchestra – composed for the visit in 1979 of the recently elected Pope John Paul II to his home city of Kraków. Górecki made a rare appearance on the podium to conduct its premiere.
This personal triumph to some degree offset his treatment at the hands of the Communist party, when he had been "airbrushed" out of all the records of the Katowice music school for a significant anniversary earlier that year. The clash in the city of Bydgoszcz in March 1981 between rural Solidarity members and the militia that helped bring about General Wojciech Jaruzelski's imposition of martial law the following December was commemorated in Górecki's Miserere for unaccompanied chorus. Completed in 1987, it was premiered in Włocławek, the town in which, three years earlier, the body of Father Jerzy Popiełuszko had been discovered.
The political upheavals of the early 1980s saw the abrupt curtailment of the composer's trips abroad. Further ill health combined with the sudden return of his isolation caused Górecki to turn in on himself via music mostly written for much smaller forces, such as Lerchenmusik (Lark Music, playing on the name of its commissioner, the Danish countess Louise Lerche-Lerchenborg, 1984-86), a moving tribute to Olivier Messiaen for clarinet, cello and piano that is among his most recorded compositions.
Not everything that Górecki wrote during the last 30 years of his life was directly inspired by his Catholic faith and meditative style. Both movements of the short Harpsichord Concerto for the Polish harpsichordist Elizbieta Chojnacka, for instance – written during the brief period of greater political freedom in 1980 – are fast and extrovert. And though Polish plainchant continues to underly the material of a work such as Kleines Requiem für eine Polka (Little Requiem for a Polka, 1993) for piano and 13 instruments, references to a wide range of other musics – from Beethoven to 20th-century popular idioms – became a notable feature of the composer's later output.
In his final decade, Górecki was very unwell and wrote, or at least completed, little with which he seems to have been satisfied. It has also been suggested that the success of the Third Symphony was a mixed blessing to him, at least as far as his compositional development was concerned. Two choral works date from the late 1990s: Salve, Sidus Polonorum (1997-2000) for chorus, percussion and keyboards, and Lobgesang (Hymn of Praise, 2000) for chorus and glockenspiel. His death leaves incomplete a Fourth Symphony, commissioned by an international consortium that included the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the Southbank Centre in London.
Górecki once described himself as an odludek, a recluse. Unlike Witold Lutosławski and Penderecki, he avoided the limelight that regular conducting by a composer of his own work helps to bring, yet still managed to upset the authorities in other ways from time to time. Unlike Andrzej Panufnik, he remained in Poland to find his own path, away from the limiting horizons imposed by modernist aesthetics as well as by political restraints.
While his earlier, more modernist scores will never achieve the popularity accorded to his more approachable output, Górecki's belated recognition was achieved with the assistance of those who value that output as a whole, notably the British musicologist Adrian Thomas, whose 1997 book on the composer provides a comprehensive introduction. Two articles by Thomas in the periodical Contact (1983-84) had helped pave the way for wider recognition in the west, notably through a publishing contract with Boosey & Hawkes in 1988, leading to collaborations with the Kronos Quartet and the release of the Third Symphony by Nonesuch Records.
While in certain respects more evidently Polish than his well-known compatriots, Górecki also managed to speak to a worldwide audience, many of whom do, indeed, feel both starved of the spiritual and impatient with the rigours of the avant garde. In using modernist ideas as just one building block in the forging of his own idiom, Górecki demonstrated that it was possible for a late 20th-century composer to write music of individuality and substance while simultaneously achieving unusual success.
He is survived by Jadwiga, his daughter, Anna, and son, Mikolaj.
Adrian Thomas writes: The strength and startling originality of Górecki's character shone through his music from the earliest days, the lightning and thunder of his orchestral Scontri (Collisions) giving way to the reflective luminescence of his Third String Quartet (1995), entitled ...songs are sung. Yet he was an intensely private man, sometimes impossible, with a strong belief in family, a great sense of humour, a physical courage in the face of unrelenting illness, and a capacity for firm friendship. I was privileged over almost four decades to witness his life away from the score and concert platform.
The extremes of his character as a musician were reflected when he dug out unpublished pieces for me and recreated them on his studio piano, or when he coached young performers of his music in Los Angeles. He guarded his compositional workshop zealously, so that when I asked him in the mid-1990s if I could look at his sketch books, he refused point blank. Yet a couple of evenings later he relented, allowing me to choose just one, although I had to return it at breakfast the next day. His wife wondered why my light was on all night.
In 1987 I holidayed with the family in the Tatra mountains, where he was in his element, hiking and talking to local craftsmen and farmers. It seemed to me that he, like Karol Szymanowski before him, was never happier than in the company of Tatra musicians, from the highland people known as Górale, occasionally joining in on the fiddle. With Jadwiga, he passed on a boundless enthusiasm for music to their two children and six grandchildren, of whom he was justly proud.
Henryk Mikołaj Górecki, composer, born 6 December 1933; died 12 November 2010
This article was amended on 15 November. The original gave the surname of Górecki's teacher as Szabelsi. This has been corrected. It also gave the translation of Lerchenmusik as Larks' Music, now amended to Lark Music, and the origin of that name is explained.