A correspondence of souls. These words come to our mind while we listen to the choral Totus Tuus by Henryk Mikołaj Górecki and pore over John Paul II’s Marian prayers. Górecki’s work, dedicated to the ‘Holy Father John Paul II on His third pilgrimage to Poland’, already on account of its title and dedication, refers to the Marian treasury of the Peter of our time. However, its content produces a special resonance: out of this treasury it brings out words and ideas that appear to be the spiritual mirror of the language of sounds recorded in the musical composition. The mirror is so clear and complete that it can at the same time occupy the place of the original work, whose reflected image will become musical tones. The musical piece and the prayer composition stand in a way on one line towards each other. However, we are not interested in such relationships that in order to expressively manifest musical narrative we have to seek some corresponding ‘literary program’, specific ‘inspiration’ or ‘illustration’. What we want is to point to something more general and profound at the same time: similarity and unique closeness of ‘tones’ and ‘voices’, ‘looks’ and ‘feelings’, characteristic ‘speaking inner lives’ or co-radiating ‘sources’, ‘places’ that intersect and touch one another. That is what we can call the closeness of souls.
We reveal this harmony of music and prayer in two parallel discourses. The first is a sequence of analytical-interpretive miniatures. Each of them is a quasi-hermeneutical attempt to read the constitutive categories and expressive-semiotic qualities of the musical form. The other discourse is a kind of canonical prayer/meditation paraphrase of John Paul II’s Marian statements, which is based on quotations from His Holiness’s texts. It is divided into separately harmonized pictures, which accompany successive fragments of the Totus Tuus.

Translated by Jerzy Adamko