Symphony of Sorrowful Songs

This piece is an evocation of the bonds between mother and child. The three movements keep with this theme, the first and third details a mothers the loss of a child and the second the child’s separation from their mother. Henryk G__recki choose three different lyrical pieces to fit with the symphony the First movement is from a song of lamentation from the Polish Holy Cross Monastery, of Mary for her son Jesus, and the pain she suffered knowing his fate it dates from the second-half of the 15th century. The second movement comes from a message inscribed and signed on wall 3, cell 3, in the basement of Gestapo headquarters in Zadopane, by an 18 year-old Polish woman the imprisoned in 1944 during World War II. The third is a Silesian folk song and the voice is that of a mother searching in vain for the dead body of her child, killed in the Silesian uprising between Poland and Germany. Lines 1019-1080 is the moment when Medea speaks alone in one of her longest monologues in the drama and laments over her role as a mother and her relationship with her children, knowing that she is going to murder them and struggling with this as someone who have birth to them and tried to raise them well. I suggest reading the passage as you listen to the selection.