Totus Tuus Op.60

In spite of an early reputation as a radical modernist, the young hero of the Warsaw Autumn festivals in the 1960s, Henryk Górecki was little known outside Poland until the mid-1990s. Then suddenly, out of the blue, his anything but modernistic Third Symphony achieved enormous popularity. The phenomenon was all the more surprising in that the “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs,” as he called it, was already 20 years old and had been featured in three commercial recordings before the version by Dawn Upshaw (with David Zinman and the London Sinfonietta) made its mark. It was issued at just the right time, it turned out, to appeal to a world-wide public taste for “holy minimalism” – a cult which also embraced, among others, John Tavener in this country and Arvo Pärt in Estonia.

Totus Tuus is a work in a vein similar to that of the Third Symphony and in a similar church-mode influenced language. Scored for unaccompanied double chorus, it is dedicated to Pope John-Paul II who, as Cardinal Wojtyła, had commissioned Górecki’s large-scale choral piece Beatus Vir ten years earlier. It was first performed at a High Mass in Victory Square, Warsaw, on the Pope’s visit to the city in 1987. In these circumstances one would not expect anything very complicated and indeed, while it is a severe test of choral intonation, Totus Tuus presents few problems to the listener. If there is a problem it is not in the notes but in the symbolism:    the text, taken from a poem in praise of the Virgin Mary by Maria Boguslawska, was chosen as an allusion to the then Pope’s episcopal coat of arms, a cross with an ‘M’ and the motto ‘Totus tuus.’ The great achievement of the work, apart from the purity of its sound, is its timelessness. It moves so slowly and makes such extensive use of repetition, both of the word “Mary” and of its short main theme, that the passage of time is irrelevant. For the record, it actually lasts about eleven minutes.

Gerald Larner © 2009