Round and about Górecki's Symphony No.3

Abstract

Wagner's Tristan is often referred to as the beginning of modern music: justifiably, in that in it a thousand years of European consciousness, will, desire, aspiration, pain, renunciation and guilt implode and explode. Taking his theme from the twilight of Europe's Middle Ages when the modern world was born, Wagner created a mythic drama which anticipates the central myth-makers of our time – Freud, Jung, and Marx. In a concept appropriating Christian redemption to Greek-tragedy's pity and terror, the gods are ourselves; and what Hardy called the pain of consciousness, proving too great to be borne, seeks release in unconscious nirvana. Much of the then avant garde music of the early 20th century, notably the Second Viennese School, stems from that tortuously self-involved but verklärte night; and it is hardly surprising that so incestuous a notion should have been balanced by its polar opposite. In his Rite of Spring of 1913 Stravinsky, born in a White Russia that had bypassed the European Renaissance, effected a conscious cult of the barbarically unconscious: a fertility rite and sacrifical murder in tune with the elemental cycles of the year, but also with the impending ‘death of Europe’ in the World Wars. Bartók, living in a country where a folk culture was still active, had less need of Stravinsky's cosmopolitan self-consciousness, but could fuse primitive techniques with the European legacy of Beethoven. Janáček, in Moravia, could create operas that were allied to seasonal rites, while probing the depths of the modern, divided psyche.