WARSAW – Polish composer Henryk Mikolaj Gorecki has died in his home city of Katowice following a serious illness. He was 76.
He died in the cardiology ward of a hospital in the city, in southern Poland, Joanna Wnuk-Nazarowa, director of Polish Radio Orchestra in Katowice, said.
The composer, best-known for his Third Symphony, Sorrowful Songs, was suffering from a number of ailments, mainly a lung infection, she said. Ms Wnuk-Nazarowa said she and Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki had visited Gorecki in hospital on Wednesday. "Penderecki insisted on seeing him," she said. "We tried to joke, make plans for the future. Penderecki promised he would direct Beatus Virfor the 80th birthday" both would celebrate in 2013.
Gorecki was best-known internationally for his Third Symphony, Sorrowful Songs, for soprano solo and orchestra, published in the US in 1994. It later sold more than a million copies.
Although his early works were more avant garde, Gorecki was later influenced by traditional Polish music and the themes of his nation’s history, as reflected in the Third Symphony. In the second movement, the composer set to music a prayer inscribed by a prisoner on the wall of her cell in a Nazi prison during the second World War.
Beatus Virwas commissioned by Karol Wojtyla before he became Pope John Paul II to mark 900 years since the death of Roman Catholic martyr Stanislaw, bishop of Krakow, whom Pope John Paul II later made a saint. The composition, completed in 1979, is a psalm for baritone, choir and orchestra.
In awarding him an honorary fellowship in 2008, Cardiff University praised Gorecki for “his independence of thought and independence of spirit. His work is grounded in a profound humanity and is rooted in the folk and religious culture of his native Poland.”
Gorecki was born on December 6th, 1933, in Czernica, near Rybnik in the coal mining Silesia region. He is survived by his wife Jadwiga, a piano teacher; daughter Anna Gorecka-Stanczyk, a pianist; and son Mikolaj Gorecki, a composer. – (AP)