[5] That year, Elektra Nonesuch released a recording of the 15-year-old symphony performed by the London Sinfonietta that topped the classical charts in Britain and the United States.

[6] It has sold more than a million copies, vastly exceeding the expected lifetime sales of a typical symphonic recording by a 20th-century composer.

[7] From May 2024, a very careful handwritten copy of the score from the collection of the National Library of Poland, written by the composer himself, is presented at a permanent exhibition in the Palace of the Commonwealth.

[8][9] 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.

During the 1970s, Górecki 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.

"[12] Later that year, Górecki 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.

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".

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.

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".

[4] 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.

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.

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'): The canon ends with all the strings (except the double basses) sustaining a single note, E4.

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 Helena Błażusiakówna on the cell wall in Zakopane.

With a duration of approximately seventeen minutes, it comprises three verses in A minor[4] and, like the first movement, is constructed from evolving variations on a simple motif.

[4] In Górecki'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]".

[11] While Górecki 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.

3 was written in 1976, when Górecki was, in the words of the music critic Jane Perlez, "a fiery figure, fashionable only among a small circle of modern-music aficionados".

[24] The 1977 world première at the Royan Festival, Ernest Bour conducting, was reviewed by six western critics, all of them harshly dismissive.

[28] Górecki recalled that, at the premiere, he sat next to a "prominent French musician", probably Pierre Boulez, who, after hearing the twenty-one repetitions of an A-major chord at the end of the symphony, loudly exclaimed: "Merde!

[27] It was deemed a masterpiece by Polish critics,[30] although, during the late 1970s and early 1980s, recordings and performances were widely criticised by the press outside Poland.

Although Gorecki's name was featured prominently on the front cover, the sleeve notes on the back provided little information about the work,[33] and Górecki's name appeared in smaller type than those of the main actors.

[34] In the mid-1980s, the British industrial music group Test Dept used the symphony as a backdrop for video collages during their concerts to express sympathy with the Polish Solidarity movement,[35] which Górecki also supported (his 1981 piece Miserere was composed in part as a response to government opposition of Solidarity trade unions).

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.

[5] 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.

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?

"[5] Steinberg compared the success of Górecki's symphony to the Doctor Zhivago phenomenon of 1958: "Everybody rushed to buy the book; few managed actually to read it.

It was used by several 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), in the Netflix series (season 2, episode 7) The Crown, and in Terrence Malick's A Hidden Life (2019).

In 2017 Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite set the first movement of the symphony as a ballet called Flight Pattern, commissioned by the Royal Opera House.