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How a Somber Symphony Sold More Than a Million Records

The Polish composer Henryk Gorecki in 1993.Credit...Jean Guyaux

In 1989, the record executive Robert Hurwitz attended a London performance of the Polish composer Henryk Gorecki’s Symphony No. 3, subtitled “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs.”

“I was just completely knocked out,” he said in a recent interview. “And somewhere in the first movement, I thought, well, Dawn should do this.” He reached out to the young soprano Dawn Upshaw, who agreed to record the symphony with the conductor David Zinman and the London Sinfonietta for Mr. Hurwitz’s label, Nonesuch.

“I think a lot of people might like this,” Mr. Hurwitz recalled thinking, “and we might sell 25,000 or 30,000 copies.”

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Henryk Gorecki’s Symphony No. 3, recorded on Nonesuch, which sold over a million copies.

That turned out to be an understatement: Within a year of the album’s release in April 1992, it was selling about 10,000 units per day. Ultimately, Mr. Gorecki’s Third sold over a million records, an extraordinary number for an album of contemporary classical music.

“It obviously touched a nerve in the public that no one could ever have anticipated,” said Mr. Hurwitz, who stepped down from running Nonesuch last year.

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The record executive Robert Hurwitz.Credit...Chad Batka for The New York Times

This year is the 25th anniversary of that auspicious release, a doleful 53-minute symphony that swept the Billboard charts, as well as the 40th anniversary of the work’s 1977 premiere. In today’s era of digital disruption and streaming services — in which the record industry has finally seen a positive uptick after over a decade of plummeting sales — that Gorecki moment deserves a fresh appraisal.

Like his compatriots Krzysztof Penderecki and Witold Lutoslawski, Mr. Gorecki had in his early work experimented with modernist techniques like serialism. But in the 1970s, he began to explore a more folk-inflected, tonal language.

His Third Symphony represented a stylistic breakthrough: austerely plaintive, emotionally direct and steeped in medieval modes. Inspired by the theme of maternal bonds in wartime and often viewed as a memorial for the victims of the Holocaust, it features a soprano singing three texts in Polish, including a prayer written on the wall of a Gestapo prison cell and a folk song in which a mother laments the loss of her son.

But the work’s Gothic tint counted against it at its premiere, which took place at an avant-garde festival in France. A prominent musician, rumored to have been Pierre Boulez, apparently shouted “merde,” while one critic called it “decadent trash.” Although three different recordings were released in the 1980s, the symphony had a limited audience until the Nonesuch album.

Early American sales of that Nonesuch record were strong, but the symphony truly took off after a newly established British radio station, Classic FM, placed it in regular rotation in September 1992, during its first week on air. Warner Classics UK, part of Nonesuch’s corporate parent, quickly shifted its marketing strategy and sent copies of the disc to tastemakers including Mick Jagger, Enya and the archbishop of Canterbury. By February 1993, it had reached No. 6 on the British pop charts.

Mr. Gorecki was quickly branded, alongside John Tavener and Arvo Pärt, as part of a new genre of “holy minimalism.” Mr. Tavener’s 1992 album “The Protecting Veil” and previous releases of Mr. Pärt’s elegiac music, on ECM, had also sold briskly.

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The saxophonist Colin Stetson performing at a music festival in 2014. He has released his own rendition of the Gorecki symphony.Credit...Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times

In a reappraisal of the period in his recent book “Music After the Fall,” an essential survey of contemporary music, the British journalist Tim Rutherford-Johnson identifies this spiritual minimalism as a kind of marketing gimmick. Though their music shared a meditative ethos, Mr. Gorecki, Mr. Tavener and Mr. Pärt were mostly unaffiliated with one another: “Holy minimalism” was a category largely invented by critics and maintained by publicists.

Mr. Rutherford-Johnson situates Mr. Gorecki’s music as part of the same trend as the album “Chant” — a 1994 recording of medieval music by Benedictine monks that went double platinum — in appealing to a young demographic as “exotic yet unthreatening” in a manner that “contributed to a chic, design-oriented, aspirational lifestyle.”

“Spiritual minimalism demonstrated in the clearest terms to those with a financial stake in contemporary music,” Mr. Rutherford-Johnson writes, “that there was a potentially large and hitherto untapped audience.” The record industry immediately attempted to seize the Gorecki moment: “Everyone’s trying to find out the formula,” one Warner executive said at the time. “If I knew what it was, I’d put it in a bottle and use it again.”

Peter Gelb, now the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, said in a recent interview, “The Gorecki was a phenomenon.” In the mid-1990s, Mr. Gelb was president of Sony Classical and witnessing a worldwide sales slump for classical music. In the preceding decade, classical labels had profited immensely by converting their back catalogs from LP to CD.

But by 1993, the market had readjusted: Catalogs were exhausted, new recordings were expensive to produce, and sales began to steeply decline. Labels increasingly turned to crossover gimmicks like the Three Tenors to maintain profits, so an out-of-nowhere hit like the Gorecki was closely examined.

“What I did and what other companies did was to look for new music sources,” Mr. Gelb said. “Most new music, of course, doesn’t sell. So it was a question of finding the right new music.”

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Mr. Stetson’s album “Sorrow,” which is his interpretation of the symphony.

Along with releasing albums by the then-up-and-coming Bang on a Can collective, Mr. Gelb saw film scores as a lucrative opportunity. He paired the composer John Corigliano with the director François Girard to create the soundtrack for the film “The Red Violin,” complete with a complementary concerto for the violinist Joshua Bell.

“That was the kind of thing I aspired to create,” Mr. Gelb said. “It was art, and it was commercially successful.” That era in Sony Classical’s history peaked with another phenomenon: the “Titanic” soundtrack, which was released in 1997 and sold more than 30 million copies.

Meanwhile, Philips Classics started the label Point Music to, as one executive put it, “redefine what is considered ‘classic’ music”; BMG Classics launched its Catalyst imprint for contemporary music aimed toward a youthful MTV audience. Such marketing-driven projects also yielded notable music: Tastefully curated by the critic Tim Page, the short-lived Catalyst released intriguing work by Alvin Curran and Einojuhani Rautavaara, and, led by Philip Glass, Point Music issued albums by Gavin Bryars and Arthur Russell.

There were also less subtle attempts to cash in on the Gorecki craze. “Remember Gorecki’s Third Symphony?” BMG Classics asked in a news release. “Well, David Zinman is at it again with a world-premiere recording by another relatively unknown 20th-century composer. Sounds like another hit in the making.”

Needless to say, that album of music by the early-20th-century French composer Charles Koechlin was no hit. Indeed, none of the Gorecki follow-ups, including Nonesuch’s subsequent releases devoted to the composer, achieved anything like the success of the original.

Mr. Gorecki himself was bewildered by his newfound fame. His output slowed, and he never completed a successor to his most famous work before he died, in 2010. (In 2014, the London Philharmonic gave the premiere of his Fourth Symphony, finished and orchestrated by Mr. Gorecki’s son.)

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The soprano Dawn Upshaw in 2013. She recorded Mr. Gorecki’s Symphony No. 3 with the conductor David Zinman and the London Sinfonietta for an April 1992 release.Credit...Ruby Washington/The New York Times

“The first royalty check he got was in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and he kept it in his wallet for a long enough time that we had to reissue it, because he wouldn’t cash it,” Mr. Hurwitz said. “It may just have been such a shock to all of a sudden go from someone who had struggled to find recognition, to someone who was at that moment as famous as any modern composer in the world.”

Even if it was notoriously trendy among Gen-Xers in the ’90s, Mr. Gorecki’s symphony holds up as an impressive artistic achievement. As in the large-scale sacred works of Mr. Pärt, the trance-like allure of slow-moving tonal harmonies has the undergirding of an elegant structure: The simple language of the first movement, a canon that expands outward from subterranean low strings, accrues a granitic weight that is sustained across the entire work. The first entrance of Ms. Upshaw in the Nonesuch recording, intoning a 15th-century Polish lament, maintains its original pathos.

“The music is still timeless,” Ms. Upshaw, who became known in the 1990s as the “voice of Gorecki,” said in an interview. “It still speaks very directly, in the same way, to its listeners as it did then. And unfortunately, the pain, the atrocities of the situation that brought Gorecki to write the piece still exist.”

Last year, the experimental saxophonist Colin Stetson, a collaborator with bands including Arcade Fire and Bon Iver, released his own rendition of the symphony, an album called “Sorrow.” He first heard the Nonesuch recording in college and described it in an interview as “transfixing.”

“It’s almost like a mathematic theorem,” he said. “It’s like this proof that he was able to get at some reliable and consistent approach to conjuring up this basic human emotion.”

Mr. Stetson had long aspired to create his own version of the work, and he gathered a 12-piece group of indie musicians, including the drummer Greg Fox, a member of the black metal band Liturgy, to record a reverent and densely visceral reinterpretation.

“What I wanted to do was to examine the piece in its original form,” Mr. Stetson said. “To try to figure out where and how the brush strokes were oriented, and to just extend them in the directions that I saw that they were already going: to push it a little bit further timbrally, a little bit further emotionally, dynamically.”

The state of the record industry is, however, quite different now than a quarter-century ago. “We didn’t quite reach a million in sales,” Mr. Stetson said, with a laugh.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section AR, Page 11 of the New York edition with the headline: The Success of a Somber Symphony. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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