reimagining Górecki
Oct. 21st, 2025 12:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
When the composer Henryk Górecki died 15 years ago, I wrote a post largely about how I'd discovered his music. Excerpts:
Now DGK has sent me a scholarly (but readable) article on the history of the Third's reputation before the Zinman recording. It didn't have the wide renown of subsequent years, but no, it wasn't that obscure. It was played and commented on. True, some people hated it (and still do!) but it was generally praised and considered remarkable. I guess we just never came across those. Though in fact DGK tells me that he'd gone looking for the record after reading a review in Fanfare, the review magazine for fans of the truly esoteric in classical record collecting. I hadn't known of that alert, but it proves the point: there was awareness and praise of the work.
But the article makes the situation remind me even more forcibly of Tolkien. For, of course, there were lots of reviews of The Lord of the Rings when it first came out in 1954-55, and articles about it later; it just wasn't the widespread popular phenomenon it became after 1965. And, as with Górecki's Third, though there's an assumption that it was generally panned when new, that turns out not to be true. There's an article in the upcoming Tolkien Studies 21 - which is in press right now - called "Reconsidering the Early Critical Response to The Lord of the Rings" by Matthew Thompson-Handell, which reveals that the general early critical response to the book was quite favorable, even among some of the reviews which have gained a reputation as pans. The guy who wrote, "This is not a work which many adults will read through more than once"? That's taken totally out of context and does not express what he meant. Read Thompson-Handell's article and you'll see.
Sometime in the mid 1980s, DGK, explorer of new and unusual music, showed me an obscure LP he'd picked up out of random curiosity. Packaged as the soundtrack album to a French film called Police, it consisted in fact of a full recording of a modern Polish symphony for soprano and orchestra. Neither on the record album nor anywhere else that he looked was there much information to be had on the work or its composer, one Henryk Górecki. DGK was astonished and spellbound by the audacity and craft of this music, and, unlike with many of his passions, when he played it for me I was too. ... For years, this marvelous piece of music remained our secret shared passion that hardly anybody else had heard of, like The Lord of the Rings in its early days. When I began to collect CDs a few years later, I found a German import with this work on it, and bought it quickly. Imagine our astonishment, then, when in 1992 a new recording of it on Nonesuch, a well-known American classical label - conducted by David Zinman - became a monster hit and the toast of the classical world, the first contemporary work to reach the top of the classical charts. The musical equivalent of the Lord of the Rings paperbacks had hit the stands. Suddenly our obscure passion was the talk of the town.The resemblance with being an early Tolkien fan hit me forcibly, though I wasn't old enough to remember that personally. Of course, we didn't think we were literally the only people who knew this piece, but nobody we knew did and no critics we read mentioned it, so it remained our secret gem. And then, all of a sudden in 1992, as with Tolkien in 1965 its fame exploded and everybody, at least in the field, knew it and was talking about it all the time.
Now DGK has sent me a scholarly (but readable) article on the history of the Third's reputation before the Zinman recording. It didn't have the wide renown of subsequent years, but no, it wasn't that obscure. It was played and commented on. True, some people hated it (and still do!) but it was generally praised and considered remarkable. I guess we just never came across those. Though in fact DGK tells me that he'd gone looking for the record after reading a review in Fanfare, the review magazine for fans of the truly esoteric in classical record collecting. I hadn't known of that alert, but it proves the point: there was awareness and praise of the work.
But the article makes the situation remind me even more forcibly of Tolkien. For, of course, there were lots of reviews of The Lord of the Rings when it first came out in 1954-55, and articles about it later; it just wasn't the widespread popular phenomenon it became after 1965. And, as with Górecki's Third, though there's an assumption that it was generally panned when new, that turns out not to be true. There's an article in the upcoming Tolkien Studies 21 - which is in press right now - called "Reconsidering the Early Critical Response to The Lord of the Rings" by Matthew Thompson-Handell, which reveals that the general early critical response to the book was quite favorable, even among some of the reviews which have gained a reputation as pans. The guy who wrote, "This is not a work which many adults will read through more than once"? That's taken totally out of context and does not express what he meant. Read Thompson-Handell's article and you'll see.