Dr Carey, while this description could be technically correct if one follows those scholars who consider the Hebrew-rooted concept of “Holocaust” to include — among others — non-Germanic peoples, especially Poles and Slavic peoples in general and Romani, as well as European Jews, it is, I think, also open to misinterpretation.

Throughout the 1960s (and perhaps late 1950s), Gorecki developed ideas and/or sketches for a memorial to the victims of Auschwitz which was located near his home in southern Poland (and which was the camp where an aunt died — his grandfather having died in Dachau near Munich and a third close relative in another camp elsewhere). However, when he was asked to complete this project and to have the work performed at a memorial service at Auschwitz he stopped working on it. His colleague Penderecki, however, did complete his “Dies Irae” short oratorio – based upon Latin and Greek texts — which was presented at an Auschwitz memorial concert during the same period.

Whether Gorecki, in fact, ‘continued that Auschwitz work in new guise’ in 1976, as has been described elsewhere, is, I believe, open to question, given the transition of his modernist musical language (partially serial to chromatic/modal) and his memorial focus between the 1960s and 1976, and also his choice of the Polish language for his 1976 masterpiece.

It is well known that the germs of his Symphony #3 are texts from the 15th-century “Holy Cross Lament”, an inscription by an 18 year old female Polish Catholic dissident imprisoned by the Gestapo in Zakopane south of Krakow, and an ethnic Polish folk song which speaks of warfare and a mother crying over her dead son — especially the last.

Referring to his Symphony and his aborted Auschwitz project, Gorecki is quoted as saying “It came to my mind to write some similar songs for soprano and orchestra.” However, his Symphony would not, I imagine, have been critically or culturally well received as an Auschwitz or Holocaust memorial work in, say 1968. The work today is, I believe, seen less as a Holocaust (however interpreted) work, than as an anti-German fascist and more universal anti-war work (with the texts and contexts of the last two movements trumping the Polish Catholic opening text). These are important distinctions to consider, I believe, as we each think about the music of the past third of a century.

I think he’s talking about the overall chamber music tradition of Western classical music: not the quartet repertoire exclusively. Bach didn’t write string quartets, but he certainly did write a lot of great chamber music.

Forgive me if I misunderstood, but did he imply Bach wrote string quartets?