Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima: Terror and Sorrow

01/03/22 • 32 min

Fifty two strings. Eight minutes. Thirty seven seconds. Completed in 1960, Krzysztof Penderecki’s Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima has become one of his most well-known works thanks to its use in soundtracks of films by David Lynch, Wes Craven and Alfonso Cuarón. In this podcast we explore its genesis, how its textures suggest an incomprehensible terror and sorrow, and its transition from abstraction to memorial.

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Previous Episode

Symphonies - Symphony No 7, 'Seven Gates Of Jerusalem'

In the final episode of Jack's curated series, he charts the changing musical styles embraced by Penderecki across his career, using his symphonies as a starting point. Zooming in on the Seventh Symphony, Jack explains how Penderecki paints the epic picture of the founding of a city. Jack grapples with the challenges posed by a radically varied musical language, and argues that, far from a weakness, this eclecticism could be Penderecki's great strength.

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Brigade of Death: Memory and Outrage

On 8 September, 1939, when Krzysztof Penderecki was just a few weeks shy of his sixth birthday, German forces took control of his home town of Dębica with its majority Jewish population. Between then and the liquidation of the Dębica ghetto in 1943, the young Penderecki had to witness the Nazi regime’s systematic intimidation, segregation and extermination of Europe’s Jews as it played out literally his own doorstep. Twenty years later he took Leon Weliczker’s Holocaust memoir, Brigade of Death, and constructed a work for narrator and electronics which, following its premiere, would not be performed again until 2011. Reflecting on a painful history in this podcast, we explore Brigade of Death and the reactions of different generations of listeners to Penderecki’s work.

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