Henryk Górecki was born in Silesia in 1933, lost his pianist mother at age two, was banned from her piano by his father and stepmother, and spent 20 months in a hospital bed after a misdiagnosed hip injury turned into bone tuberculosis. This episode traces how that early suffering shaped a composer who later said he often talked with death, and how he self-educated in a post-war shortage economy by buying one new score every week before entering the Academy of Music in Katowice.

The episode follows his mastery of 12-tone serialism during his geometrical period, the sensation of Scontri at the 1960 Warsaw Autumn Festival, and his decision in the mid-1970s to abandon the avant-garde for slow, tonal, voice-centered music that critics labeled holy minimalism. At its center is the Third Symphony, built on a 15th-century Polish lament, a prayer s ...