‘I’m Just Showing What Górecki Wrote’: An Interview With Isabella Bywater

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About listening to Górecki's music in the context of own experiences and events in the world. An interview with Isabella Bywater, director of the Symphony Of Sorrowful Songs in English National Opera.

The premiere of the Górecki’s Symphony reimagined for the London Coliseum stage by Isabella Bywater will take place on 27 April 2023. The soloist will be Nicole Chevalier, the orchestra will be conducted by Lidia Yankovskaya.

Filip Lech: Do you remember your first encounter with Henryk Mikołaj Górecki’s music?

Isabella Bywater: When I was asked to adapt the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, about fourteen months ago, in January of last year, I recognized the name. I remembered having heard it before, but I don’t know when I heard it. I came across it on the radio – I was listening to BBC Radio 3, and it came on. I thought it was beautiful. I was given a copy on CD, with Dawn Upshaw singing. I recognized the cover of the Elektra Nonesuch label edition, so I must have also played it some years before that. It was sort of in my system, but I wasn’t very aware of it.

FL: I would like to ask you to try to describe Górecki’s music, especially Symphony No. 3. What do you think makes it special, or different?

IB: What I felt, and what I still feel, is very powerful, very personal. The music almost enters your body. It’s not like noise, but it almost changes the way your body feels. There is an intellectual side, but this is what I feel physically in my body when I hear it. It just communicates with you. I guess it’s about the emotions he’s discussing, observing or showing. It talks about: grief, god, and being a human. What is life and loss? All these big subjects.

FL: Do you like working with contemporary music?

IB: I didn’t do it very often. Górecki’s music reminds me of Arvo Pärt’s and John Taverner’s works. I think it’s about an interest in early music. Although it doesn’t sound like early music, there is a certain resonance of religious and existential music in Górecki – some aspect of meditation perhaps? Personally, I’m an atheist, but I can hear it, there’s a really religious quality to it. It’s about the whole nature of humanity. It has a kind of shape to it and a meditative repetition, which I think of in a relation to the church.

Although it is modern, the music simultaneously feels ancient. I’m ashamed to say I don’t think I know enough about the other composers. There is an element of Philipp Glass, but I don’t think that Glass is in the same league as Górecki. There’s obviously some aspect of that kind of repetition and the certain kind of quality of the texture that is reminiscent of Glass’s work. But I feel that the result is not at all the same.

FL: Some critics describe the music of Górecki, Pärt and Taverner as ‘'holy minimalism’.'

IB: Yeah, that would feel completely right to me. Because it is very rich but very minimal, it doesn’t mess around with anything else. It’s not showing off. I think that it’s kind of distilled. Although it’s only an hour long, it’s huge. The big experience is that the symphony consists of three parts, each of them based on the lyrics of a different song [Editor’s note: the first is a 15th-century Polish Marian lament, the second is a message written on the wall of a cell in the Gestapo headquarters during World War II, and the third is a Silesian folk song about a mother looking for her son who died during the Silesian Uprising].

FL: It feels cathartic.

''Symphony of the Sorrowful Songs", photo: English National Opera

IB: Yes, there is that, and a transitional feeling too, because each of the songs has a transition. The first one is a transition from: 'Why can’t you hear me? I kind of miss you, speak to me, where are you? I loved you for so long, I’ve looked after you for so long'. This is obviously in the words, but also in the sounds, almost like grabbing somebody. Part of her is with the person who disappeared, and her spirit is travelling, somehow, with the dead son. She’s trying to reach him. There is almost an element of ecstasy that she reaches. So the whole thing changes from 'Don’t leave me' to almost 'I’ll come with you' – 'I’m going to die of sorrow'.

Then, for me, that feels like in the first song, that you have this fantastic existential kind of understanding that he is somewhere else, and she is sort of there as well. Some part of her is in this other place that isn’t in this world. She can nearly do it, but then she can’t quite do it and there is a kind of collapse into 'I have to just live with this now.' I have to continue my life with this sorrow, and it will be different. The sorrow you have in the end of the song and in the beginning of the song is completely different. This process is really amazing in between. All the three parts have a journey within them – an almost physical, emotional process of transition from one part of grief into another.

I went through something similar when my mother died last year, she died two days before I was asked to do this – of course, this is different to the situation described in Górecki’s work – she was 90 years old, I loved her very much. When I heard the music, I thought that it was exactly how I felt. I feel like all of my insides are falling down, like a constant kind of miserable waterfall. The sound was to me extraordinarily observant about the state of grief. I can never talk about the piece without crying. I do it often.

It’s very interesting that he doesn’t actually even allow her to sing for 20 minutes. The emotion is so strong that she can’t say anything. It’s too much for people to speak. In the second part of the Symphony – and she starts almost suddenly, it’s a very odd thing – the music in the beginning of the second song has a tiny bit of light in it. I imagine it’s as if she is asleep, and it is at that moment when you wake up and see the tiny bit of sunlight coming onto your pillow, and then you remember that the day is terrible. When you’ve had a terrible thing happen in your life and there is just a tiny part of a second when you’ve forgotten, and it’s like wow, I remember everything, and I can’t deal with this. Then she’s singing to her mother, to help her. It really is psychologically accurate – Górecki is able to express this unusually. I’m thinking of people in hospitals. I've not seen people in wars, but I’ve seen and heard about people in hospitals. Sometimes a child is more worried about their mother crying by their bed than about their own death. In this song, it changes – she starts singing to her mother, trying to support her and give her strength. Simultaneously, she’s really frightened, and it’s a very different kind of path from the first woman. She’s trying to say goodbye to her mother in a way, and then in the process she is sort of realising something of her own mortality and the loss she is going to face.

The third part is also very different and absolutely extraordinary, with this search – which people have done for thousands of years – for their dead and not finding them. This is happening now in Ukraine, Syria, Afghanistan, and any number of other countries where people are fighting and people go missing. I feel there is a kind of 'every woman', every mother from anywhere, since time immemorial and forever in the future. The music in the last part sounds almost pastoral, and there is none of that in the first two songs. It’s this awful cycle of searching. For a long time I thought about the break at the end of that song, where the silence is. What is this all about? Is it like during a catholic service when there is a silence before the bread turns into the body of Christ? Is it something related to a transfiguration of some sort?

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Symphony of Sorrowful Songs" English National Opera Rehearsal, photo: www.eno.org

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FL: Is there something about the spectacle you want to disclose before the premiere, without spoilers?

IB: I would like to say that I’m not making it into a narrative. I’m just showing what Górecki wrote, my interpretation of what Górecki’s saying. I’m not doing anything extra. It is almost like an installation, in an abstract space, although it’s completely fully staged it is not a narrative, there is no end and no beginning. It’s very simple and minimal.

In my programme note, I quoted T. S. Elliot – 'In my beginning is my end.' Something I felt very early on with the sound, when it first comes, and it creeps you out a little – like it’s always there, but you are only hearing it now that you are paying attention. This whole sorrow was always there, all the time, throughout history.

So, I really didn’t want to set it in a hospital or during a war, etc. I wanted to take three people with these three very similar, but not quite the same, states of mind. – very universal and personal and belonging to all of the history.

FL: Does working with the Polish language cause any problems?

IB: I’m not singing it, so we’d have to ask Nicole Chevalier, the soprano about that. I’m very pleased we’re doing it in Polish because the sound of the language is important. I believe that the Polish used by Górecki is quite archaic; it’s not contemporary Polish. So even Polish people might stumble when listening to it.

I’m very proud and lucky to be doing this piece. It means an enormous amount to me. I think this piece has been timely at every time in history, but now it feels particularly timely for us to think about these things and to care for each other. It’ll be amazing to have 2500 people in one space listening live. I don’t think that happens often. Most of us in England have heard the recordings, but we’ve not heard it even in concert that much.

One of the things that I experienced when I went to Poland in the 1980s is that in those days in England, people were very lazy about their history, unless they were historians or studying it at the university. But on the whole the public were not really interested in history, and they were not particularly interested even in politics. I was absolutely astonished that these friends that I made – a jazz musician and two actresses from Kraków – were so extraordinarily well-educated about Polish history for hundreds of years and really interested in contemporary politics, in a way that I’ve never seen happen here, and interested otherwise generally in all cultures, which is not absolutely typical in England – as you can see, if you are watching the news about our country and our government, and you obviously know about what’s going on with English National Opera. This country wants to destroy its culture, and they don’t understand that without culture, we are nothing because we have nothing if we don’t have religion or culture. And I feel so desperately that the death of culture is almost as awful as the death of the person. Culture is all about communication, communicating things is about being a human being and about being alive.

FL: But maybe a crisis of culture is needed for the rebirth of culture?

IB: The culture will always fight to be there, because it is so crucial to us, people. Whether it’s music or words or art, any of the complicated things, we will always do it. When you see it being destroyed… But there will always be a rebirth.

FL: You have worked in Russia many times in the past. How do you see the current situation, the war? Have you discussed this with your Russian friends?

IB: My Russian friends who have escaped are heartbroken, ashamed, and devastated. The ones, who didn’t escape, don’t speak to me. I don’t know if they’re blocked, because we used to communicate on social media, and I’ve e-mailed a couple of people, and they don’t answer, so I don’t know whether they are not allowed to speak to me now, but I suspect that they are also putting their fingers in their ears.

I don’t know anyone who thinks that Putin is a good man or that anything that he is doing is a good idea. One of my good friends who was working at the Mariinsky Theatre and now lives in Tbilisi, she is about my age. One of the things that broke her heart the most is that her family believes the propaganda. They treat her as if she’s mad. She found that fantastically isolating.

FL: Can you imagine returning to Russian theatre?

IB: Not really. I would really be sorry not to see my friends again, and I can’t imagine it now, but maybe in ten years, maybe something will change. If people will be allowed to speak again, because they won’t even speak to me. If I did go, I could give them a hug, but I couldn’t have a conversation, because people would be nervous. Of course, that'd be better than nothing.

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contemporary music

henryk mikołaj górecki

english national opera