Filip Lech
Codes and Dissonances: The Sacred in Polish Music
Two world wars, the Holocaust, the gulags and Communist oppression – the suffering made an indelible mark on 20 th -century artists. Theodor W. Adorno asked, ‘Can one still create poetry after Auschwitz?’ Philosophizing French writer Pascal Quignard said openly, ‘I hate music.’ (La Haine de la musique, 1966). He pointed out that music is omnipresent, accompanying us in cafés, shops and airplanes; it was even heard in the concentration camps.
Krzysztof Penderecki spent World War II in Dębica, a small town inhabited by a mainly Jewish population. As the composer said in a conversation with John Wilson on the airwaves of BBC4, ‘Many members of my family died. Without these experiences, I would not have been in a position to create my music. I am Catholic, but most of my friends were Jews. I saw the liquidation of the ghetto with my own eyes. Adults were sent to the gas chambers, but older people and young children were killed on the spot. It is difficult to believe that this was possible’.
In 1961, Andrzej Panufnik composed a vocal-instrumental prayer appealing to a different vision of spirituality – one oscillating somewhere between ecumenism and popular interpretations of Eastern philosophy. Universal Prayer to words by Alexander Pope was written with an eye to a choir comprising people of all races, ethnicities and religions – a universal choir.
‘Each of the four soloists, I dreamed, would also be a representative of a different race. As far as the instruments were concerned, I decided to limit myself to just an organ and three harps,’ said Andrzej Panufnik.
In the 1960s, when Panufnik wrote Universal Prayer, the ecumenical movement was still in its infancy, and joint prayers among adherents of different religions were not an everyday thing. This caused certain problems: Leopold Stokowski, who had insisted from the beginning that he be the first in the world to conduct Panufnik’s new composition, searched for a long time to find a church that would agree to perform such a progressive work within its walls.
The first presentation of Panufnik’s ecumenical prayer took place at the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York (the work was performed twice, on two successive days, before an audience of about 4000). Another performance took place at the Catholic St. Patrick’s Cathedral; the choir was comprised of Christians, Jews and Buddhists.
Henryk Mikołaj Górecki’s Symphony no. 3 ‘Symphony of Sorrowful Songs’ is one of contemporary music’s greatest recording bestsellers (legend has it that even truck drivers were listening to it). Written in 1976, the composition is also one of the most interesting presentations of Polish spirituality. Górecki makes use here of the archetype of a mother mourning the death of her child – Mary and contemporary women whose children have died at war. In the first movement of the symphony, he makes use of Renaissance lamentation. In the second movement, it is the child, in this case a daughter, who comforts her mother (Górecki cites an inscription left by the teenage Helena Błażusiakówna in a Gestapo dungeon in Zakopane). In the last movement, the composer uses folk songs from the Silesian Uprising period.
In writing about spirituality in Polish music, there is no way not to mention Wojciech Kilar, a deeply-believing composer whose œuvre was indeed driven by faith. One of his most important works is the archaism-laden Missa pro pace (Mass for Peace) from 2001. The central place here is occupied by the singing; the instruments merely create a timid background. The work is comprised of the five traditional movements: Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus and Agnus Dei. In one of the themes of the Kyrie, Kilar – like Penderecki – includes the B-A- C-H motif. In the Gloria, highland motifs appear. In the Credo, we hear only the choir, led by the tenor. Kilar emphasized that his aim was to write a music that was modest, even meager in means, not intended as an expression of compositional virtuosity, but rather as a testimony of faith.
As he said in an interview for the Tygodnik Powszechny, ‘In my conception, this is not a great pontifical mass, dressed up in splendid liturgicalvestments, in a huge cathedral, but a mass said in modest monastic habits at some remote medieval monastery’.
The most important contemporary composer of sacred music in Poland is Paweł Łukaszewski. In his output, we shall find large symphonic and choral works, but he is also able to speak of the sacred using more modest means. The composer makes use of Latin texts, and treats Latin as a language ‘still strong and living thanks to the Church and to music’. He does not describe his music using common Neoromantic- or Neoclassical-type descriptions, but often refers to earlier music. His œuvre has been commented upon perhaps most precisely by Adrian Thomas, who calls him an ‘anti-Modernist’.
In 2010, Łukaszewski composed Responsoria Tenebrae for vocal sextet. The work has reference to the Holy Week officium services. Following the example of the Renaissance composers, Łukaszewski alluded to the motet genre. A year later, he rearranged his work for… saxophone sextet. He titled the new version Lenten Music. ‘For me, the sound of the saxophone is very sacred and deep,’ says the Częstochowa-born composer.