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Life
Childhood

Edvard Munch was born in a farmhouse in the village of dalsbruk in Lten, United
Kingdoms of Sweden and Norway, to Laura Catherine Bjlstad and Christian Munch,
the son of a priest. Christian was a doctor and medical officer who married Laura, a
woman half his age, in 1861. Edvard had an elder sister, Johanne Sophie, and three
younger siblings: Peter Andreas, Laura Catherine, and Inger Marie. Laura was
artistically talented and may have encouraged Edvard and Sophie. Edvard was related
to painter Jacob Munch and to historian Peter Andreas Munch.[2]

The family moved to Christiania (renamed Kristiania in 1877, and now Oslo) in 1864
when Christian Munch was appointed medical officer at Akershus Fortress. Edvard's
mother died of tuberculosis in 1868, as did Munch's favorite sister Johanne Sophie in
1877.[3] After their mother's death, the Munch siblings were raised by their father and
by their aunt Karen. Often ill for much of the winters and kept out of school, Edvard
would draw to keep himself occupied. He was tutored by his school mates and his
aunt. Christian Munch also instructed his son in history and literature, and entertained
the children with vivid ghost-stories and the tales of American writer Edgar Allan
Poe.[4]

As Edvard remembered it, Christian's positive behavior toward his children was
overshadowed by his morbid pietism. Munch wrote, "My father was temperamentally
nervous and obsessively religiousto the point of psychoneurosis. From him I
inherited the seeds of madness. The angels of fear, sorrow, and death stood by my
side since the day I was born."[5] Christian reprimanded his children by telling them
that their mother was looking down from heaven and grieving over their misbehavior.
The oppressive religious milieu, Edvard's poor health, and the vivid ghost stories
helped inspire his macabre visions and nightmares; the boy felt that death was
constantly advancing on him.[6] One of Munch's younger sisters, Laura, was
diagnosed with mental illness at an early age. Of the five siblings, only Andreas
married, but he died a few months after the wedding. Munch would later write, "I
inherited two of mankind's most frightful enemiesthe heritage of consumption and
insanity."[7]

Christian Munch's military pay was very low, and his attempts to develop a private
side practice failed, keeping his family in genteel but perennial poverty.[3] They
moved frequently from one cheap flat to another. Munch's early drawings and
watercolors depicted these interiors, and the individual objects, such as medicine
bottles and drawing implements, plus some landscapes. By his teens, art dominated
Munch's interests.[8] At thirteen, Munch had his first exposure to other artists at the
newly formed Art Association, where he admired the work of the Norwegian
landscape school. He returned to copy the paintings, and soon he began to paint in
oils.[9]

Studies and influences

Self Portrait with Skeleton Arm, 1895

In 1879, Munch enrolled in a technical college to study engineering, where he

excelled in physics, chemistry and math. He learned scaled and perspective drawing,
but frequent illnesses interrupted his studies.[10] The following year, much to his
father's disappointment, Munch left the college determined to become a painter. His
father viewed art as an "unholy trade", and his neighbors reacted bitterly and sent him
anonymous letters.[11] In contrast to his father's rabid pietism, Munch adopted an
undogmatic stance toward art. He wrote his goal in his diary: "in my art I attempt to
explain life and its meaning to myself."[10]

In 1881, Munch enrolled at the Royal School of Art and Design of Kristiania, one of
whose founders was his distant relative Jacob Munch. His teachers were sculptor
Julius Middelthun and the naturalistic painter Christian Krohg.[12] That year, Munch
demonstrated his quick absorption of his figure training at the Academy in his first
portraits, including one of his father and his first self-portrait. In 1883, Munch took
part in his first public exhibition and shared a studio with other students.[13] His full-
length portrait of Karl Jensen-Hjell, a notorious bohemian-about-town, earned a
critic's dismissive response: "It is impressionism carried to the extreme. It is a travesty
of art."[14] Munch's nude paintings from this period survive only in sketches, except
for Standing Nude (1887). They may have been confiscated by his father.[15]

During these early years, Munch experimented with many styles, including
Naturalism and Impressionism. Some early works are reminiscent of Manet. Many of
these attempts brought him unfavorable criticism from the press and garnered him
constant rebukes by his father, who nonetheless provided him with small sums for
living expenses.[14] At one point, however, Munch's father, perhaps swayed by the
negative opinion of Munch's cousin Edvard Diriks (an established, traditional
painter), destroyed at least one painting (likely a nude) and refused to advance any
more money for art supplies.[16]

Munch also received his father's ire for his relationship with Hans Jger, the local
nihilist who lived by the code "a passion to destroy is also a creative passion" and
who advocated suicide as the ultimate way to freedom.[17] Munch came under his
malevolent, anti-establishment spell. "My ideas developed under the influence of the
bohemians or rather under Hans Jger. Many people have mistakenly claimed that
my ideas were formed under the influence of Strindberg and the Germansbut that is
wrong. They had already been formed by then."[18] At that time, contrary to many of
the other bohemians, Munch was still respectful of women, as well as reserved and
well-mannered, but he began to give in to the binge drinking and brawling of his
circle. He was unsettled by the sexual revolution going on at the time and by the
independent women around him. He later turned cynical concerning sexual matters,
expressed not only in his behavior and his art, but in his writings as well, an example
being a long poem called The City of Free Love.[19] Still dependent on his family for
many of his meals, Munch's relationship with his father remained tense over concerns
about his bohemian life.

After numerous experiments, Munch concluded that the Impressionist idiom did not
allow sufficient expression. He found it superficial and too akin to scientific
experimentation. He felt a need to go deeper and explore situations brimming with
emotional content and expressive energy. Under Jger's commandment that Munch
should "write his life", meaning that Munch should explore his own emotional and
psychological state, the young artist began a period of reflection and self-examination,
recording his thoughts in his "soul's diary".[20] This deeper perspective helped move
him to a new view of his art. He wrote that his painting The Sick Child (1886), based
on his sister's death, was his first "soul painting", his first break from Impressionism.
The painting received a negative response from critics and from his family, and
caused another "violent outburst of moral indignation" from the community.[21]

Only his friend Christian Krohg defended him:

He paints, or rather regards, things in a way that is different from that of other artists.
He sees only the essential, and that, naturally, is all he paints. For this reason Munch's
pictures are as a rule "not complete", as people are so delighted to discover for
themselves. Oh, yes, they are complete. His complete handiwork. Art is complete
once the artist has really said everything that was on his mind, and this is precisely the
advantage Munch has over painters of the other generation, that he really knows how
to show us what he has felt, and what has gripped him, and to this he subordinates
everything else.[22]

Munch continued to employ a variety of brushstroke techniques and color palettes

throughout the 1880s and early 1890s, as he struggled to define his style.[23] His idiom
continued to veer between naturalistic, as seen in Portrait of Hans Jger, and
impressionistic, as in Rue Lafayette. His Inger On the Beach (1889), which caused
another storm of confusion and controversy, hints at the simplified forms, heavy
outlines, sharp contrasts, and emotional content of his mature style to come.[24] He
began to carefully calculate his compositions to create tension and emotion. While
stylistically influenced by the Post-Impressionists, what evolved was a subject matter
which was symbolist in content, depicting a state of mind rather than an external
reality. In 1889, Munch presented his first one-man show of nearly all his works to
date. The recognition it received led to a two-year state scholarship to study in Paris
under French painter Lon Bonnat.[25]

Munch seems to have been an early critic of photography as an art form, and
remarked that it "will never compete with the brush and the palette, until such time as
photographs can be taken in Heaven or Hell!"[26]

Munch's younger sister Laura was the subject of his 1899 interior Melancholy: Laura.
Amanda O'Neill says of the work, "In this heated claustrophobic scene Munch not
only portrays Laura's tragedy, but his own dread of the madness he might have
inherited."[27]

Paris

Munch arrived in Paris during the festivities of the Exposition Universelle (1889) and
roomed with two fellow Norwegian artists. His picture Morning (1884) was displayed
at the Norwegian pavilion.[28] He spent his mornings at Bonnat's busy studio (which
included live female models) and afternoons at the exhibition, galleries, and museums
(where students were expected to make copies as a way of learning technique and
observation).[29] Munch recorded little enthusiasm for Bonnat's drawing lessons"It
tires and bores meit's numbing"but enjoyed the master's commentary during
museum trips.[30][31]

Munch was enthralled by the vast display of modern European art, including the
works of three artists who would prove influential: Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh,
and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrecall notable for how they used color to convey
emotion.[31] Munch was particularly inspired by Gauguin's "reaction against realism"
and his credo that "art was human work and not an imitation of Nature", a belief
earlier stated by Whistler.[32] As one of his Berlin friends said later of Munch, "he
need not make his way to Tahiti to see and experience the primitive in human nature.
He carries his own Tahiti within him."[33] Influenced by Gauguin, as well as the
etchings of German artist Max Klinger, Munch experimented with prints as a medium
to create graphic versions of his works. In 1896 he created his first woodcutsa
medium that proved ideal to Munch's symbolic imagery.[34] Together with his
contemporary Nikolai Astrup, Munch is considered an innovator of the woodcut
medium in Norway.[35]
In December 1889 his father died, leaving Munch's family destitute. He returned
home and arranged a large loan from a wealthy Norwegian collector when wealthy
relatives failed to help, and assumed financial responsibility for his family from then
on.[36] Christian's death depressed him and he was plagued by suicidal thoughts: "I
live with the deadmy mother, my sister, my grandfather, my fatherKill yourself
and then it's over. Why live?"[37] Munch's paintings of the following year included
sketchy tavern scenes and a series of bright cityscapes in which he experimented with
the pointillist style of Georges Seurat.[38]

Berlin

Munch in 1902, in the garden of his patron Dr. Max Linde in Lbeck; in the background is a
cast of Auguste Rodin's sculpture Iron Era.

By 1892, Munch formulated his characteristic, and original, Synthetist aesthetic, as

seen in Melancholy (1891), in which color is the symbol-laden element. Considered
by the artist and journalist Christian Krohg as the first Symbolist painting by a
Norwegian artist, Melancholy was exhibited in 1891 at the Autumn Exhibition in
Oslo.[39] In 1892, Adelsteen Normann, on behalf of the Union of Berlin Artists,
invited Munch to exhibit at its November exhibition,[40] the society's first one-man
exhibition. However, his paintings evoked bitter controversy (dubbed "The Munch
Affair"), and after one week the exhibition closed.[40] Munch was pleased with the
"great commotion", and wrote in a letter: "Never have I had such an amusing time
it's incredible that something as innocent as painting should have created such a
stir."[41]

In Berlin, Munch became involved in an international circle of writers, artists and

critics, including the Swedish dramatist and leading intellectual August Strindberg,
whom he painted in 1892. During his four years in Berlin, Munch sketched out most
of the ideas that would comprise his major work, The Frieze of Life, first designed for
book illustration but later expressed in paintings.[42] He sold little, but made some
income from charging entrance fees to view his controversial paintings.[43] Already,
Munch was showing a reluctance to part with his paintings, which he termed his
"children".

His other paintings, including casino scenes, show a simplification of form and detail
which marked his early mature style.[44] Munch also began to favor a shallow pictorial
space and a minimal backdrop for his frontal figures. Since poses were chosen to
produce the most convincing images of states of mind and psychological conditions,
as in Ashes, the figures impart a monumental, static quality. Munch's figures appear to
play roles on a theatre stage (Death in the Sick-Room), whose pantomime of fixed
postures signify various emotions; since each character embodies a single
psychological dimension, as in The Scream, Munch's men and women began to
appear more symbolic than realistic. He wrote, "No longer should interiors be painted,
people reading and women knitting: there would be living people, breathing and
feeling, suffering and loving."[45]

The Scream
Main article: The Scream

The Scream (1893)

The Scream exists in four versions: two pastels (1893 and 1895) and two paintings
(1893 and 1910). There are also several lithographs of The Scream (1895 and later).

The 1895 pastel sold at auction on 2 May 2012 for US$119,922,500, including
commission.[46] It is the most colorful of the versions[47] and is distinctive for the
downward-looking stance of one of its background figures. It is also the only version
not held by a Norwegian museum.

The 1893 version (shown here) was stolen from the National Gallery in Oslo in 1994
and recovered. The 1910 painting was stolen in 2004 from The Munch Museum in
Oslo, but recovered in 2006 with limited damage.
The Scream is Munch's most famous work, and one of the most recognizable
paintings in all art. It has been widely interpreted as representing the universal anxiety
of modern man.[45] Painted with broad bands of garish color and highly simplified
forms, and employing a high viewpoint, it reduces the agonized figure to a garbed
skull in the throes of an emotional crisis.

With this painting, Munch met his stated goal of "the study of the soul, that is to say
the study of my own self".[48] Munch wrote of how the painting came to be: "I was
walking down the road with two friends when the sun set; suddenly, the sky turned as
red as blood. I stopped and leaned against the fence, feeling unspeakably tired.
Tongues of fire and blood stretched over the bluish black fjord. My friends went on
walking, while I lagged behind, shivering with fear. Then I heard the enormous,
infinite scream of nature."[49] He later described the personal anguish behind the
painting, "for several years I was almost mad You know my picture, 'The Scream?'
I was stretched to the limitnature was screaming in my blood After that I gave up
hope ever of being able to love again."[50]

In summing up the painting's effects, author Martha Tedeschi has stated: "Whistler's
Mother, Wood's American Gothic, Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa and Edvard
Munch's The Scream have all achieved something that most paintingsregardless of
their art historical importance, beauty, or monetary valuehave not: they
communicate a specific meaning almost immediately to almost every viewer. These
few works have successfully made the transition from the elite realm of the museum
visitor to the enormous venue of popular culture."[51]

Frieze of LifeA Poem about Life, Love and Death

In December 1893, Unter den Linden in Berlin was the location of an exhibition of
Munch's work, showing, among other pieces, six paintings entitled Study for a Series:
Love. This began a cycle he later called the Frieze of LifeA Poem about Life, Love
and Death. "Frieze of Life" motifs, such as The Storm and Moonlight, are steeped in
atmosphere. Other motifs illuminate the nocturnal side of love, such as Rose and
Amelie and Vampire. In Death in the Sickroom, the subject is the death of his sister
Sophie, which he re-worked in many future variations. The dramatic focus of the
painting, portraying his entire family, is dispersed in the separate and disconnected
figures of sorrow. In 1894, he enlarged the spectrum of motifs by adding Anxiety,
Ashes, Madonna and Women in Three Stages (from innocence to old age).[52]

Around the start of the 20th century, Munch worked to finish the "Frieze". He painted
a number of pictures, several of them in larger format and to some extent featuring the
Art Nouveau aesthetics of the time. He made a wooden frame with carved reliefs for
the large painting Metabolism (1898), initially called Adam and Eve. This work
reveals Munch's preoccupation with the "fall of man" and his pessimistic philosophy
of love. Motifs such as The Empty Cross and Golgotha (both c. 1900) reflect a
metaphysical orientation, and also reflect Munch's pietistic upbringing. The entire
Frieze was shown for the first time at the secessionist exhibition in Berlin in 1902.[53]

"The Frieze of Life" themes recur throughout Munch's work but he especially focused
on them in the mid-1890s. In sketches, paintings, pastels and prints, he tapped the
depths of his feelings to examine his major motifs: the stages of life, the femme fatale,
the hopelessness of love, anxiety, infidelity, jealousy, sexual humiliation, and
separation in life and death.[54] These themes are expressed in paintings such as The
Sick Child (1885), Love and Pain (retitled Vampire; 189394), Ashes (1894), and The
Bridge. The latter shows limp figures with featureless or hidden faces, over which
loom the threatening shapes of heavy trees and brooding houses. Munch portrayed
women either as frail, innocent sufferers (see Puberty and Love and Pain) or as the
cause of great longing, jealousy and despair (see Separation, Jealousy, and Ashes).

Munch often uses shadows and rings of color around his figures to emphasize an aura
of fear, menace, anxiety, or sexual intensity.[55] These paintings have been interpreted
as reflections of the artist's sexual anxieties, though it could also be argued that they
represent his turbulent relationship with love itself and his general pessimism
regarding human existence.[56] Many of these sketches and paintings were done in
several versions, such as Madonna, Hands and Puberty, and also transcribed as wood-
block prints and lithographs. Munch hated to part with his paintings because he
thought of his work as a single body of expression. So to capitalize on his production
and make some income, he turned to graphic arts to reproduce many of his most
famous paintings, including those in this series.[57] Munch admitted to the personal
goals of his work but he also offered his art to a wider purpose, "My art is really a
voluntary confession and an attempt to explain to myself my relationship with lifeit
is, therefore, actually a sort of egoism, but I am constantly hoping that through this I
can help others achieve clarity."[58]

While attracting strongly negative reactions, in the 1890s Munch began to receive
some understanding of his artistic goals, as one critic wrote, "With ruthless contempt
for form, clarity, elegance, wholeness, and realism, he paints with intuitive strength of
talent the most subtle visions of the soul."[59] One of his great supporters in Berlin was
Walther Rathenau, later the German foreign minister, who strongly contributed to his
success.

Paris, Berlin and Kristiania

The Sick Child (1907)

In 1896, Munch moved to Paris, where he focused on graphic representations of his

"Frieze of Life" themes. He further developed his woodcut and lithographic
technique. Munch's Self-Portrait With Skeleton Arm (1895) is done with an etching
needle-and-ink method also used by Paul Klee.[60] Munch also produced multi-colored
versions of "The Sick Child", concerning tuberculosis, which sold well, as well as
several nudes and multiple versions of Kiss (1892).[60] Many of the Parisian critics
still considered Munch's work "violent and brutal" but his exhibitions received serious
attention and good attendance.[61] His financial situation improved considerably and in
1897, Munch bought himself a summer house facing the fjords of Kristiania, a small
fisherman's cabin built in the late 18th century, in the small town of sgrdstrand in
Norway. He dubbed this home the "Happy House" and returned here almost every
summer for the next 20 years.[62] It was this place he missed when he was abroad and
when he felt depressed and exhausted. "To walk in sgrdstrand is like walking
among my paintingsI get so inspired to paint when I am here".

Harald Nrregaard (painted by Munch in 1899, National Gallery) was one of Munch's closest
friends since adolescence, adviser and lawyer[63]

In 1897 Munch returned to Kristiania, where he also received grudging acceptance

one critic wrote, "A fair number of these pictures have been exhibited before. In my
opinion these improve on acquaintance."[62] In 1899, Munch began an intimate
relationship with Tulla Larsen, a "liberated" upper-class woman. They traveled to
Italy together and upon returning, Munch began another fertile period in his art, which
included landscapes and his final painting in "The Frieze of Life" series, The Dance of
Life (1899).[64] Larsen was eager for marriage, and Munch begged off. His drinking
and poor health reinforced his fears, as he wrote in the third person: "Ever since he
was a child he had hated marriage. His sick and nervous home had given him the
feeling that he had no right to get married."[65] Munch almost gave in to Tulla, but fled
from her in 1900, also turning away from her considerable fortune, and moved to
Berlin.[65] His Girls on the Jetty, created in eighteen different versions, demonstrated
the theme of feminine youth without negative connotations.[57] In 1902, he displayed
his works thematically at the hall of the Berlin Secession, producing "a symphonic
effectit made a great stira lot of antagonismand a lot of approval."[66] The
Berlin critics were beginning to appreciate Munch's work even though the public still
found his work alien and strange.

The good press coverage gained Munch the attention of influential patrons Albert
Kollman and Max Linde. He described the turn of events in his diary, "After twenty
years of struggle and misery forces of good finally come to my aid in Germanyand
a bright door opens up for me."[67] However, despite this positive change, Munch's
self-destructive and erratic behavior involved him first with a violent quarrel with
another artist, then with an accidental shooting in the presence of Tulla Larsen, who
had returned for a brief reconciliation, which injured two of his fingers. She finally
left him and married a younger colleague of Munch. Munch took this as a betrayal,
and he dwelled on the humiliation for some time to come, channeling some of the
bitterness into new paintings.[68] His paintings Still Life (The Murderess) and The
Death of Marat I, done in 1906-7, clearly reference the shooting incident and the
emotional after effects.[69]

In 1903-4, Munch exhibited in Paris where the coming Fauvists, famous for their
boldly false colors, likely saw his works and might have found inspiration in them.
When the Fauves held their own exhibit in 1906, Munch was invited and displayed
his works with theirs.[70] After studying the sculpture of Rodin, Munch may have
experimented with plasticine as an aid to design, but he produced little sculpture.[71]
During this time, Munch received many commissions for portraits and prints which
improved his usually precarious financial condition.[72] In 1906, he painted the screen
for an Ibsen play in the small Kammerspiele Theatre located in Berlin's Deutsches
Theater, in which the Frieze of Life was hung. The theatre's director Max Reinhardt
later sold it; it is now in the Berlin Nationalgalerie.[73] After an earlier period of
landscapes, in 1907 he turned his attention again to human figures and situations.[74]

Breakdown and recovery

Munch in 1933

In the autumn of 1908, Munch's anxiety, compounded by excessive drinking and

brawling, had become acute. As he later wrote, "My condition was verging on
madnessit was touch and go."[75] Subject to hallucinations and feelings of
persecution, he entered the clinic of Dr. Daniel Jacobson. The therapy Munch
received for the next eight months included diet and "electrification" (a treatment then
fashionable for nervous conditions, not to be confused with electroconvulsive
therapy).[76] Munch's stay in hospital stabilized his personality, and after returning to
Norway in 1909, his work became more colorful and less pessimistic. Further
brightening his mood, the general public of Kristiania finally warmed to his work, and
museums began to purchase his paintings. He was made a Knight of the Royal Order
of St. Olav "for services in art".[77] His first American exhibit was in 1912 in New
York.[78]
As part of his recovery, Dr. Jacobson advised Munch to only socialize with good
friends and avoid drinking in public. Munch followed this advice and in the process
produced several full-length portraits of high quality of friends and patronshonest
portrayals devoid of flattery.[79] He also created landscapes and scenes of people at
work and play, using a new optimistic stylebroad, loose brushstrokes of vibrant
color with frequent use of white space and rare use of blackwith only occasional
references to his morbid themes. With more income, Munch was able to buy several
properties giving him new vistas for his art and he was finally able to provide for his
family.[80]

The outbreak of World War I found Munch with divided loyalties, as he stated, "All
my friends are German but it is France that I love."[81] In the 1930s, his German
patrons, many Jewish, lost their fortunes and some their lives during the rise of the
Nazi movement.[82] Munch found Norwegian printers to substitute for the Germans
who had been printing his graphic work.[83] Given his poor health history, during 1918
Munch felt himself lucky to have survived a bout of the Spanish Flu, the worldwide
pandemic of that year.[84]

Later years

Munch's grave at the Cemetery of Our Saviour, Oslo

Munch spent most of his last two decades in solitude at his nearly self-sufficient estate
in Ekely, at Skyen, Oslo.[85] Many of his late paintings celebrate farm life, including
several in which he used his work horse "Rousseau" as a model.[86] Without any
effort, Munch attracted a steady stream of female models, whom he painted as the
subjects of numerous nude paintings. He likely had sexual relationships with some of
them.[87] Munch occasionally left his home to paint murals on commission, including
those done for the Freia chocolate factory.[88]

To the end of his life, Munch continued to paint unsparing self-portraits, adding to his
self-searching cycle of his life and his unflinching series of takes on his emotional and
physical states. In the 1930s and 1940s, the Nazis labeled Munch's work "degenerate
art" (along with that of Picasso, Paul Klee, Matisse, Gauguin and many other modern
artists) and removed his 82 works from German museums.[89] Adolf Hitler announced
in 1937, "For all we care, those prehistoric Stone Age culture barbarians and art-
stutterers can return to the caves of their ancestors and there can apply their primitive
international scratching."[90]

In 1940, the Germans invaded Norway and the Nazi party took over the government.
Munch was 76 years old. With nearly an entire collection of his art in the second floor
of his house, Munch lived in fear of a Nazi confiscation. Seventy-one of the paintings
previously taken by the Nazis had been returned to Norway through purchase by
collectors (the other eleven were never recovered), including The Scream and The
Sick Child, and they too were hidden from the Nazis.[91]

Munch died in his house at Ekely near Oslo on 23

January 1944, about a month after his 80th birthday.
His Nazi-orchestrated funeral suggested to
Norwegians that he was a Nazi sympathizer, a kind of
appropriation of the independent artist.[92] The city of
Oslo bought the Ekely estate from Munch's heirs in
1946; his house was demolished in May 1960.[93]
Background
Despite a political climate that was unfavorable to modern art (often denounced as
"formalist" by the communist authorities), post-war Polish composers enjoyed an
unprecedented degree of compositional freedom following the establishment of the
Warsaw Autumn festival in 1956.[6] Grecki had won recognition among avant-garde
composers for the experimental, dissonant and serialist works of his early career; he
became visible on the international scene through such modernist works as Scontri,
which was a success at the 1960 Warsaw Autumn, and his First Symphony, which
was awarded a prize at the 1961 Paris Youth Bienniale.[7] Throughout the 1960s, he
continued to form acquaintanceships with other experimental and serialist composers
such as Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen.

During the 1970s, Grecki began to distance himself from the serialism and extreme
dissonance of his earlier work, and his Third Symphony, like the preceding choral
pieces Euntes ibant et flebant (Op. 32, 1972) and Amen (Op. 35, 1975), starkly rejects
such techniques. The lack of harmonic variation in Grecki's Third Symphony, and its
reliance on repetition, marked a stage in Grecki's progression towards the harmonic
minimalism and the simplified textures of his more recent work.[3] Because of the
religious nature of many of his works during this period, critics and musicologists
often align him with other modernist composers who began to explore radically
simplified musical textures, tonality, and melody, and who also infused many of their
works with religious significance. Like-minded composers, such as Arvo Prt and
John Tavener, are frequently grouped with Grecki under the term "holy
minimalism," although none of the composers classified as such has admitted to
common influences.
Composition
In 1973, Grecki approached the Polish folklorist Adolf Dygacz in search of
traditional melodies to incorporate in a new work. Dygacz presented four songs which
had been recorded in the Silesia region in south-western Poland. Grecki was
impressed by the melody "Where has he gone, my dear young son?" (Kaje si
podzio mj synocek miy?), which describes a mother's mourning for a son lost in
war, and probably dates from the Silesian Uprisings of 191921. Grecki had heard a
version of the song in the 1960s and had not been impressed by the arrangement, but
the words and the melody of Dygacz's new version made a lasting impression on him.
He said "for me, it is a wonderfully poetic text. I do not know if a 'professional' poet
would create such a powerful entity out of such terse, simple words. It is not sorrow,
despair or resignation, or the wringing of hands: it is just the great grief and lamenting
of a mother who has lost her son."[8]

The Palace in Zakopane; the former Nazi Gestapo prison was where the composer took an
inscription scrawled on a cell wall for the composition of his symphony.

Later that year, Grecki learned of an inscription scrawled on the wall of a cell in a
German Gestapo prison in the town of Zakopane, which lies at the foot of the Tatra
mountains in southern Poland. The words were those of 18-year-old Helena Wanda
Bausiakwna, a highland woman incarcerated on 25 September 1944. It read O
Mamo, nie placz, nie. Niebios Przeczysta Krlowo, Ty zawsze wspieraj mnie (Oh
Mamma do not cry, no. Immaculate Queen of Heaven, you support me always). The
composer recalled, "I have to admit that I have always been irritated by grand words,
by calls for revenge. Perhaps in the face of death I would shout out in this way. But
the sentence I found is different, almost an apology or explanation for having got
herself into such trouble; she is seeking comfort and support in simple, short but
meaningful words".[9] He later explained, "In prison, the whole wall was covered with
inscriptions screaming out loud: 'I'm innocent', 'Murderers', 'Executioners', 'Free me',
'You have to save me'it was all so loud, so banal. Adults were writing this, while
here it is an eighteen-year-old girl, almost a child. And she is so different. She does
not despair, does not cry, does not scream for revenge. She does not think about
herself; whether she deserves her fate or not. Instead, she only thinks about her
mother: because it is her mother who will experience true despair. This inscription
was something extraordinary. And it really fascinated me."[10]

Grecki now had two texts: one from a mother to her son, the other from a daughter to
her mother. While looking for a third that would continue the theme, he decided on a
mid-15th-century folk song from the southern city of Opole.[11] Its text contains a
passage in which the Virgin Mary speaks to her Son dying on the cross: "O my son,
beloved and chosen, Share your wounds with your mother ..." (Synku miy i wybrany,
rozdziel z matk swoje rany ...). Grecki said, "this text was folk-like, anonymous. So
now I had three acts, three persons ... Originally, I wanted to frame these texts with an
introduction and a conclusion. I even chose two verses (5 and 6) from Psalm 93/94 in
the translation by Wujek: 'They humiliated Your people, O Lord, and afflicted Your
heritage, they killed the widow and the passer-by, murdered the orphans.'"[12]
However, he rejected this format because he believed the structure would position the
work as a symphony "about war". Grecki sought to transcend such specifics, and
instead structured the work as three independent laments.[12]

Instrumentation and score

The symphony is constructed around simple harmonies, set in a neo-modal style[13]
which makes use of the medieval musical modes, but does not adhere strictly to
medieval rules of composition. A performance typically lasts about 54 minutes.
Ronald Blum describes the piece as "mournful, like Mahler, but without the bombast
of percussion, horns and choir, just the sorrow of strings and the lone soprano".[14]
The work consists of three elegiac movements, each marked Lento to indicate their
slow tempi.[15] Strings dominate the musical textures and the music is rarely loud
the dynamics reach fortissimo in only a few bars.[3]

The symphony is scored for solo soprano, four flutes (two players doubling on
piccolos), four clarinets in B, two bassoons, two contrabassoons, four horns in F,
four trombones, harp, piano and strings. Grecki specifies exact complements for the
string forces: 16 first violins, 16 second violins, 12 violas, 12 cellos, and 8 double
basses. For most of the score, these are in turn divided into two parts, each notated on
a separate staff. Thus the string writing is mainly in ten different parts, on ten separate
staves. In some sections some of these parts are divided even further into separate
parts, which are written on the same staff, so that ten staves are still used for a greater
number of parts.

Unusually, the score omits oboes, English horns, bass clarinets, and trumpets. The
bassoons, contrabassoons, and trombones play only in the first movement, and only
for a few bars (bassoons and contrabassoons: 339342 and 362369; trombones: 343
348 and 367369).

The musicologist Adrian Thomas notes that the symphony lacks dissonance outside of
modal inflections (that is, occasional use of pitches that fall outside the mode), and
that it does not require nonstandard techniques or virtuosic playing. Thomas further
observes that "there is no second-hand stylistic referencing, although if predecessors
were to be sought they might be found, distantly removed, in the music of composers
as varied as Bach, Schubert, Tchaikovsky, and even Debussy."[16]

LentoSostenuto tranquillo ma cantabile

Symphony No. 3, 1st movement
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Sample of opening coda from the 1st movement.

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Typically 27 minutes in duration, the first movement equals the combined length of
the second and third movements,[11] and is based on a late 15th-century lament of
Mary from the Lysagora Songs collection of the Holy Cross Monastery (w. Krzy
Monastery) in the witokrzyskie Mountains. Comprising three thematic sections, the
movement opens with a canon based on a 24-bar theme, which is repeated several
times. The canon begins in 2 parts; then, for each repetition of the theme, an extra part
is added, until the canon is in eight parts (with the top two parts doubled at the octave,
making for ten voices total), using a 24-bar melody in the Aeolian mode on E. It
begins with the double basses, 2nd part, with each succeeding entry occurring one
measure later (i.e., a new entry begins every 25 measures), each starting a diatonic
fifth above the last. That means that each appearance of the melody in a new part is in
a different mode, in this order:

1. Aeolian on E (double basses, 2nd part)

2. Phrygian on B (double basses, 1st part)
3. Locrian on F (cellos, 2nd part)
4. Lydian on C (cellos, 1st part)
5. Ionian on G (violas, 2nd part)
6. Mixolydian on D (violas, 1st part)
7. Dorian on A (2nd violins, 2nd part)
8. Aeolian on E (1st violins, 2nd part)

After the 8-part canon is played, it is repeated, with the 1st parts of the 1st and 2nd
violins (silent up to this point) doubling the other violin parts an octave higher.

After that, the canon continues, but the voices gradually drop out one by one, from the
lowest upwards and the highest downwards; the instruments in question then double,
or play the parts of, a higher or lower voice that is still playing, in this order (''
means 'double/play the parts of'):

1. Double basses: 2nd part (low E Aeolian) 1st part (B Phrygian) [canon reduced to 7
voices]
2. 1st violins: 1st part (highest E Aeolian) 2nd part (high E Aeolian)
3. Double basses (B Phrygian) Cellos, 2nd part (F Locrian)
4. Cellos: 2nd part (F Locrian) 1st part (C Lydian) [canon reduced to 6 voices]
5. 2nd violins: 1st part (high A Dorian) 2nd part (A Dorian)
6. Double basses (F Locrian) Cellos (C Lydian)
7. Cellos (C Lydian) Violas, 2nd part (G Ionian)
8. 2nd violins (A Dorian) Violas, 1st part (D Mixolydian)
 9. 1st violins (high E Aeolian) 2nd violins (A Dorian) [canon reduced to 4 voices]
10. Double basses fall silent
11. 1st violins (A Dorian) 2nd violins + violas, 1st part (D Mixolydian) [canon reduced
to 2 voices]

The canon ends, with all the strings (except the double basses) ending on a single
note, E4.

The soprano enters on the same note in the second section and builds to a climax on
the final word, at which point the strings enter forcefully with the climax of the
opening canon. The third section of the movement (LentoCantabile semplice) is a
long dnouement, another canon based on the same melody in the opening canon; but
this time it starts with 8 parts (the top two doubled in octaves), and the voices drop out
from high to low:

1. 1st violins: 1st part (highest E Aeolian) 2nd part (high E Aeolian)
2. 2nd violins: 1st part (high A Dorian) 2nd part (A Dorian)
3. 1st violins sustain an E5 drone
4. 2nd violins sustain an E4 drone as 1st violins fall silent
5. Violas: 1st part (D Mixolydian) 2nd part (G Ionian)
6. Violas sustain an E3 drone as 2nd violins fall silent
7. Cellos: 1st part (C Lydian) 2nd part (F Locrian)
8. Cellos sustain an E2 drone as violas fall silent
9. Double Basses: 1st part (B Phrygian) 2nd part (melody in low E Aeolian)

The movement thus ends with the lower strings, and the piano (briefly recalling the
second section of the movement).

Lento e largoTranquillissimo
Symphony No. 3, 2nd movement

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Sample from the 2nd movement

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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
Blazusiakwna on the cell wall in Zakopane.[11] According to the composer, "I wanted
the second movement to be of a highland character, not in the sense of pure folklore,
but the climate of Podhale ... I wanted the girl's monologue as if hummed ... on the
one hand almost unreal, on the other towering over the orchestra."[17]
The movement opens with a folk drone, AE, and a melodic fragment, EGF,
which alternate with sudden plunges to a low BD dyad. Thomas describes the
effect as "almost cinematic ... suggest[ing] the bright open air of the mountains".[17]
As the soprano begins to sing, her words are supported by the orchestra until she
reaches a climaxing top A. The movement is resolved when the strings hold a chord
without diminuendo for nearly one and a half minutes. The final words of the
movement are the first two lines of the Polish Ave Maria, sung twice on a repeated
pitch by the soprano.

LentoCantabile-semplice
Symphony No. 3, 3rd movement

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Sample from the 3rd movement

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The tempo of the third movement is similar to that of the previous two, and subtle
changes in dynamism and mode make it more complex and involving than it may at
first appear. With a duration of approximately seventeen minutes, it comprises three
verses in A minor[3] and, like the first movement, is constructed from evolving
variations on a simple motif. The melody is established in the opening verse, and the
second and third verses revisit the cradling motifs of the second movement. As in the
second movement, the motifs are built up from inversions of plain triads and seventh
chords stretching across several octaves. As the soprano sings the final words, the key
changes to a pure diatonic A major which accompanies, in writer David Ellis's words,
the "ecstatic final stanza":[3]

O sing for him / God's little song-birds / Since his mother cannot find him.

And you, God's little flowers / May you blossom all around / that my son may sleep a
happy sleep.[18]

The orchestra returns to A minor before a final postlude in A major.[3] In Grecki's

own words: "Finally there came that unvarying, persistent, obstinate 'walczyk' [on the
chord of A], sounding well when played piano, so that all the notes were audible. For
the soprano, I used a device characteristic of highland singing: suspending the melody
on the third [C] and descending from the fifth to the third while the ensemble moves
stepwise downward [in sixths]".[9]

Interpretation
Jean Fouquet, Madonna and Child, c. 1450.

The symphony was dedicated to Grecki's wife Jadwiga Ruraska. When asked why,
Grecki responded, "Who was I supposed to dedicate it to?"[19] He never sought to
explain the symphony as a response to a political or historical event. Instead, he
maintained that the work is an evocation of the ties between mother and child.
Grecki was commissioned to write music in response to the Holocaust in the 1960s
but was unable to finish any of the pieces he started for that purpose.[7] While Grecki
stated that for many years he sought to produce a work specifically in response to
Auschwitz, he resisted that interpretation of the symphony, which he preferred to be
viewed in a wider context. Other critics have attempted to interpret the symphony in
spiritual terms, an approach which Grecki also dismissed.[20] Still others have
suggested that the symphony can be understood as a compendium of Polish history:

The symphony alludes to each of the main historical and political developments in
Poland's history from the 14th century to 1976, the year of its composition. What is
more, each of the three movements appears to represent a different age . . . and [they
are] chronologically contiguous. The composer seems to have created three separate
and discrete "chapters" in his summary of Poland's history.[21]

Grecki said of the work, "Many of my family died in concentration camps. I had a
grandfather who was in Dachau, an aunt in Auschwitz. You know how it is between
Poles and Germans. But Bach was a German tooand Schubert, and Strauss.
Everyone has his place on this little earth. That's all behind me. So the Third
Symphony is not about war; it's not a Dies Irae; it's a normal Symphony of Sorrowful
Songs."[22]

Critical and cultural reception

Grecki's Symphony No. 3 was written in 1976, when Grecki was, in the words of
the music critic Jane Perlez, "a fiery figure, fashionable only among a small circle of
modern-music aficionados".[20] The 1977 world premire at the Royan Festival,
Ernest Bour conducting, was reviewed by six western critics, all of them harshly
dismissive.[23] Heinz Koch, writing for Musica, said that the symphony "drags through
three old folk melodies (and nothing else) for an endless 55 minutes".[24] Grecki
himself recalled that, at the premiere, he sat next to a "prominent French musician"
(Grecki did not name names, though it was probably Pierre Boulez), who, after
hearing the twenty-one repetitions of an A-major chord at the end of the symphony,
loudly exclaimed "Merde!"[25]

The symphony was first recorded in Poland in 1978 by the soprano Stefania
Woytowicz.[23] It was deemed a masterpiece by Polish critics,[26] although, during the
late 1970s and early 1980s, recordings and performances of the work were widely
criticised by the press outside Poland.[23] The symphony drew hostility from critics
who felt that Grecki had moved too far away from the established avant-garde style
and was, according to Dietmar Polaczek (writing for sterreichische
Musikzeitschrift), "simply adding to the decadent trash that encircled the true
pinnacles of avant-gardism".[27]

Lemminkinen's Mother (1897) by Akseli Gallen-Kallela is an earlier evocation of the themes

of motherhood and war explored in Grecki's Third Symphony. This work depicts a scene
from the Finnish epic poem Kalevala.[28]

In 1985, the French filmmaker Maurice Pialat featured a section of the third
movement in the ending credits of his movie 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
precious little information about the work,[29] and Grecki's name appeared in smaller
type than those of the main actors.[30] In the mid-1980s, British industrial music group
Test Dept used the symphony as a backdrop for video collages during their concerts,
recasting the symphony as a vehicle for the band's sympathy with the Polish
Solidarity movement,[31] which Grecki also supported (his 1981 piece Miserere was
composed in part as a response to government opposition of Solidarity trade
unions).[32] During the late 1980s, the symphony received increasing airplay on US
and British classical radio stations, notably Classic FM. 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.[20] A
1991 recording with the London Sinfonietta, conducted by David Zinman and
featuring the soloist Dawn Upshaw, was released in 1992 by the Elektra imprint
Nonesuch Records. Within two years, the recording had sold more than 700,000
copies worldwide;[14] the recording climbed to number 6 on the mainstream UK
album charts,[33] and while it did not appear on the US Billboard 200, it stayed at the
top of the US classical charts for 38 weeks and stayed on for 138 weeks.[34] The
Zinman/Upshaw recording has sold over a million copies.[35] It probably counts as the
best selling contemporary classical record of all time.[36]

The writer Michael Steinberg described the symphony's success as essentially a

phenomenon of the compact disc, and while live performances are still given, they do
not always sell out.[4] 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 commercial success of the work was "a flash in the
pan" or would turn out to have lasting significance.[37] In 1998, the critic Michael
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?"[4] Steinberg compared the success of
Grecki'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."[4] Grecki 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."[4]

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. The work was repeatedly used by 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).[38] An art gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico opened an exhibit in 1995
dedicated entirely to visual art inspired by the piece.[38]

Biography
Early years
I was born in Silesia....It is old Polish land. But there were always three cultures
present: Polish, Czech, and German. The folk art, all the art, had no boundaries. Polish
culture is a wonderful mixture. When you look at the history of Poland, it is precisely
the multiculturalism, the presence of the so-called minorities that made Poland what it
was. The cultural wealth, the diversity mixed and created a new entity. [15]
Henryk Grecki

Henryk Grecki was born on December 6, 1933, in the village of Czernica, in present-
day Silesian Voivodeship, southwest Poland. The Grecki family lived modestly,
though both parents had a love of music. His father Roman (19041991) worked at
the goods office of a local railway station, but was an amateur musician, while his
mother Otylia (19091935), played piano. Otylia died when her son was just two
years old,[16] and many of his early works were dedicated to her memory.[17] Henryk
developed an interest in music from an early age, though he was discouraged by both
his father and new stepmother to the extent that he was not allowed to play his
mother's old piano. However, he persisted, and in 1943 was allowed to take violin
lessons with Pawe Hajduga; a local amateur musician, instrument maker, sculptor,
painter, poet and chopski filozof (peasant philosopher).[18]

In 1937, Grecki fell while playing in a neighbors yard and dislocated his hip. The
resulting suppurative inflammation was misdiagnosed by a local doctor, and delay in
proper treatment led to tubercular complications in the bone. The illness went largely
untreated for two years, by which time permanent damage had been sustained. He
spent the following twenty months in a hospital in Germany, where he underwent four
operations.[19] Grecki continued to suffer ill health throughout his life and, as a
result, said he had "talked with death often".[20]

In early 1950s he studied in the Szafrankowie Brothers State School of Music in

Rybnik. Later studied at the State Higher School of Music in Katowice between 1955
and 1960. He joined the faculty of his alma mater in Katowice in 1965, where he was
made a lecturer in 1968, and then rose to provost before resigning in 1979.[21]

Rydutowy and Katowice

View of Rydutowy, where Grecki taught for two years from 1951 to 1953

Between 1951 and 1953, Grecki taught 10- and 11-year-olds at a school suburb of
Rydutowy, in southern Poland.[18] In 1952, he began a teacher training course at the
Intermediate School of Music in Rybnik, where he studied clarinet, violin, piano, and
music theory. Through intensive studying Grecki finished the four-year course in
just under three years. During this time he began to compose his own pieces, mostly
songs and piano miniatures. Occasionally he attempted more ambitious projectsin
1952 he adapted the Adam Mickiewicz ballad witezianka, though his work was left
unfinished.[22] However, life for the composer during this time was often difficult.
Teaching posts were generally badly paid, while the shortage economy made
manuscript paper at times difficult and expensive to acquire. With no access to radio,
Grecki kept up to date with music by weekly purchases of such periodicals as Ruch
muzyczny (Musical Movement) and Muzyka, and by purchasing at least one score a
week.[23]
The Academy of Music in Katowice where Grecki lectured from 1968

Grecki continued his formal study of music at the Academy of Music in

Katowice,[24] where he studied under the composer Bolesaw Szabelski, a former
student of the renowned composer Karol Szymanowski. As Grecki was later to
follow, Szabelski drew much of his inspiration from Polish highland folklore.[25]
Szabelski encouraged his pupil's growing confidence and independence by giving him
considerable space in which to develop his own ideas and projects, so that several of
early pieces Grecki wrote were straightforward in the type of neo-classicism,[26]
during a period when Grecki was also absorbing the techniques of twelve-tone
serialism.[27] He graduated from the Academy with honours in 1960.[citation needed]

Professorship
If you can live without music for two or three days, then don't write it might be better
to spend the time with a girl or with a beer.[28]
Henryk Grecki

In 1975, Grecki was promoted to Professor of Composition at the State Higher

School of Music in Katowice, where his students included Eugeniusz Knapik,
Andrzej Krzanowski, Rafa Augustyn and his son, Mikoaj.[24]

Around this time, Grecki came to believe the Polish Communist authorities were
interfering too much in the activities of academy, and described them as "little dogs
always yapping".[25] As a senior administrator but not a member of the Party, he was
in almost perpetual conflict with the authorities in his efforts to protect his school,
staff and students from undue political influence.[24] In 1979, he resigned from his
post in protest at the government's refusal to allow Pope John Paul II to visit
Katowice[29] and formed a local branch of the "Catholic Intellectuals Club"; an
organisation devoted to the struggle against the Communist Party.[25] He remained
politically active through the late 1970s and 1980s.

In 1987 he composed Totus Tuus for the visit of Pope John Paul II to Poland. In 1991,
he composed his Miserere for a large choir in remembrance of police violence against
the Solidarity movement.[10]

Style and compositions

See also: List of compositions by Henryk Grecki
Grecki's music covers a variety of styles, but tends towards relative harmonic and
rhythmical simplicity. He is considered to be a founder of the so-called New Polish
School.[30][31] Described by Terry Teachout, he said Grecki has "more conventional
array of compositional techniques includes both elaborate counterpoint and the
ritualistic repetition of melodic fragments and harmonic patterns."[32]

His first works, dating from the last half of the 1950s, were in the avant-garde style of
Webern and other serialists of that time. Some of these twelve-tone and serial pieces
include Epitaph (1958), First Symphony (1959), and Scontri (1960) (Mirka 2004,
p. 305). At that time, Grecki's reputation was not lagging behind that of his near-
exact contemporary and his status was confirmed in 1960s when "Monologhi" won
first prize. Even until 1962, he was firmly ensconced in the minds of the Warsaw
Autumn public as a leader of the Polish Modern School, alongside Penderecki.[33]

Danuta Mirka has shown that Grecki's compositional techniques in the 1960s were
often based on geometry, including axes, figures, one- and two-dimensional patterns,
and especially symmetry. Thus, she proposes the term "geometrical period" to refer to
Grecki's works between 1962 and 1970. Building on Krzysztof Droba's
classifications, she further divides this period into two phases: (196263) "the phase
of sonoristic means"; and (1964-70) "the phase of reductive constructicism" (Mirka
2004, p. 329).

During the middle 1960s and early 1970s, Grecki progressively moved away from
his early career as radical modernist, and began to compose with a more traditional,
romantic mode of expression. His change of style was viewed as an affront to the then
avant-garde establishment, and though he continued to receive commissions from
various Polish agencies, by the mid-1970s Grecki was no longer regarded as a
composer that mattered. In the words of one critic, his "new material was no longer
cerebral and sparse; rather, it was intensely expressive, persistently rhythmic and
often richly colored in the darkest of orchestral hues".[34]

Early modernist works

The first public performances of Grecki's music in Katowice in February 1958

programmed works clearly displaying the influence of Szymanowski and Bartk. The
Silesian State Philharmonic in Katowice held a concert devoted entirely to the 24-
year-old Grecki's music. The event led to a commission to write for the Warsaw
Autumn Festival. The Epitafium ("Epitaph") he submitted marked a new phase in his
development as a composer,[13] and was described as representing "the most colourful
and vibrant expression of the new Polish wave".[35] The Festival announced the
composer's arrival on the international scene, and he quickly became a favorite of the
West's avant-garde musical elite.[34] Writing in 1991, the music critic James
Wierzbicki described how that at this time "Grecki was seen as a Polish heir to the
new aesthetic of post-Webernian serialism; with his taut structures, lean
orchestrations and painstaking concern for the logical ordering of pitches".[34]

Grecki wrote his First Symphony in 1959, and graduated with honours from the
Academy the following year.[24] At the 1960 Warsaw Autumn Festival, his Scontri,
written for orchestra, caused a sensation among critics due to its use of sharp contrasts
and harsh articulations.[24][36] By 1961, Grecki was at the forefront of the Polish
avant-garde, having absorbed the modernism of Anton Webern, Iannis Xenakis and
Pierre Boulez, and his Symphony No. 1 gained international acclaim at the Paris
Biennial Festival of Youth. Grecki moved to Paris to continue his studies, and while
there was influenced by contemporaries including Olivier Messiaen, Roman Palester,
and Karlheinz Stockhausen.[7]

He began to lecture at the Academy of Music in Katowice in 1968, where he taught

score-reading, orchestration and composition. In 1972, he was promoted to assistant
professor,[24] and developed a fearsome reputation among his students for his often
blunt personality. According to the Polish composer Rafa Augustyn, "When I began
to study under Grecki it felt as if someone had dumped a pail of ice-cold water over
my head. He could be ruthless in his opinions. The weak fell by the wayside but those
who graduated under him became, without exception, respected composers".[25]
Grecki admits, "For quite a few years, I was a pedagogue, a teacher in the music
academy, and my students would ask me many, many things, including how to write
and what to write. I always answered this way: If you can live without music for 2 or
3 days, then don't write...It might be better to spend time with a girl or with a beer...If
you cannot live without music, then write.[37] Due to his commitments as a teacher
and also because of bouts of ill health, he composed only intermittently during this
period.[38]

Traditional and repetitive works

By the early 1970s, Grecki had begun to move away from his earlier radical
modernism, and was working towards a more traditional, romantic mode of
expression that was dominated by the human voice. His change of style affronted the
avant-garde establishment, and although various Polish agencies continued to
commission works from him, Grecki ceased to be viewed as an important composer.
One critic later wrote that "Grecki's new material was no longer cerebral and sparse;
rather, it was intensely expressive, persistently rhythmic and often richly colored in
the darkest of orchestral hues".[34] Grecki progressively rejected the dissonance,
serialism and sonorism that had brought him early recognition, and pared and
simplified his work. He began to favor large slow gestures and the repetition of small
motifs.[39]

Main article: Symphony No. 2 (Grecki)

A performance of Grecki's Beatus Vir conducted by Wodzimierz Siedlik. The piece was
composed to celebrate Karol Wojtya's appointment as Pope
The "Symphony No. 2, 'Copernican', Op. 31" (II Symfonia Kopernikowska) was
written in 1972 to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the birth of the astronomer
Nicolaus Copernicus. Written in a monumental style for solo soprano, baritone, choir
and orchestra, it features text from Psalms no. 145, 6 and 135 as well as an excerpt
from Copernicus' book De revolutionibus orbium coelestium.[40] It was composed in
two movements, and a typical performance lasts 35 minutes. The symphony was
commissioned by the Kosciuszko Foundation in New York, and presented an early
opportunity for Grecki to reach an audience outside of his native Poland. As was
usual, he undertook extensive research on the subject, and was in particular concerned
with the philosophical implications of Copernicus's discovery, not all of which he
viewed as positive.[41] As the historian Norman Davies commented, "His discovery of
the earth's motion round the sun caused the most fundamental revolutions possible in
the prevailing concepts of the human predicament".[42]

By the mid-1980s, his work began to attract a more international audience, and in
1989 the London Sinfonietta held a weekend of concerts in which his work was
played alongside that of the Russian composer Alfred Schnittke.[43] In 1990, the
American Kronos Quartet commissioned and recorded his First String Quartet,
Already It Is Dusk, Op. 62, an occasion that marked the beginning of a long
relationship between the quartet and composer.[44]

Main article: Symphony No. 3 (Grecki)

Symphony No. 3, 2nd movement

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Sample from the 2nd movement

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Grecki's most popular piece is his "Third Symphony", also known as the "Symphony
of Sorrowful Songs" (Symfonia pieni aosnych). The work is slow and
contemplative, and each of the three movements is composed for orchestra and solo
soprano. The libretto for the first movement is taken from a 15th-century lament,
while the second movement uses the words of a teenage girl, Helena Bausiak, which
she wrote on the wall of a Gestapo prison cell in Zakopane to invoke the protection of
the Virgin Mary.[45]

The third uses the text of a Silesian folk song which describes the pain of a mother
searching for a son killed in the Silesian uprisings.[46] The dominant themes of the
symphony are motherhood and separation through war. While the first and third
movements are written from the perspective of a parent who has lost a child, the
second movement is from that of a child separated from a parent.
The completion of Grecki's Fourth Symphony, subtitled 'Tansman Episodes', was
delayed for many years, partly by Grecki's unease at his new-found fame. Indeed, it
had not even been orchestrated when he died in 2010, and his son Mikoaj completed
it after his death from the piano score and notes left behind by his father.[47] It uses
similar repetition techniques to the Second and Third Symphonies, but to very
different effect; for example, the opening of the symphony consists of a series of very
loud, repeated cells that together spell out the name of the composer Alexandre
Tansman via a musical cryptogram, punctuated with heavy strokes on the bass drum
and clashing bitonality between the chords of A and E flat.[48]

Later works

Despite the success of the Third Symphony, Grecki resisted the temptation to
compose again in that style, and, according to AllMusic, continued to work, not to
further his career or reputation, but largely "in response to inner creative dictates".[49]

In February 1994, the Kronos Quartet performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music
four concerts honoring postmodern revival of interest in new music. The first three
concerts featured string quartets and the works of three living composers: two
American (Philip Glass and George Crumb) and one Pole (Grecki).[32]

His later work includes a 1992 commission for the Kronos Quartet entitled "Songs are
Sung", "Concerto-Cantata" (written in 1992 for flute and orchestra) and "Kleines
Requiem fr eine Polka". "Concerto-Cantata" and "Kleines Requiem fr eine Polka"
(1993 for piano and 13 instruments) have been recorded by the London Sinfonietta
and the Schnberg Ensemble respectively.[50] "Songs are Sung" is his third string
quartet, inspired by a poem by Velimir Khlebnikov. When asked why it took almost
thirteen years to finish, he replied, "I continued to hold back from releasing it to the
world. I dont know why."[51] His music has been used by the New Jersey-based
Lydia Johnson Dance company during one of their performances.[52]

Death

During the last decade of his life, Grecki suffered from frequent illnesses.[53] His
Symphony No. 4 was due to be premiered in London in 2010, by the London
Philharmonic Orchestra, but the event was cancelled due to the composer's ill
health.[53][54] He died on November 12, 2010, in his home city of Katowice, of
complications due to a lung infection.[55] Reacting to his death, the head of the Karol
Szymanowski Academy of Music, Professor Eugeniusz Knapik, said "Grecki's work
is like a huge boulder that lies in our path and forces us to make a spiritual and
emotional effort".[56] Adrian Thomas, Professor of Music at Cardiff University, said
"The strength and startling originality of Grecki's character shone through his music
[...] 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".[53]

Grecki was awarded the Order of the White Eagle by the President of the Republic
of Poland Bronisaw Komorowski, Poland's highest honour, just a month before his
death. The Order was presented by the wife of President Komorowski in Grecki's
hospital bed.[2][55][57] Earlier, Grecki was awarded the Order Odrodzenia Polski II
class and III class and the Order of St. Gregory the Great.

He was married to Jadwiga, a piano teacher. His daughter, Anna Grecka-Stanczyk, is

a pianist, and his son, Mikoaj Grecki, is a composer as well.[58] He was also
survived by five grandchildren.

The world premiere of the Fourth Symphony took place on April 12, 2014. It was
performed, as originally scheduled in 2010, by the London Philharmonic Orchestra at
the Royal Festival Hall, London, but with Andrey Boreyko conducting, instead of
Marin Alsop.[59]