Honorary degree citation - Henryk Gorecki*

By: Wolfgang Bottenberg, November 1998

Mr. Chancellor, I have the honour to present to you Henryk Gorecki, one of the most renowned and respected composers of our time.

Henryk Gorecki was born in 1933, in the town of Czernika in Poland. It was certainly a problematic time and place to enter life. The unprecedented violence of the First World War had made many old values questionable or obsolete and had replaced them with the dictates of intolerant and combative ideologies. Poland faced the most extreme representatives of such ideologies both to the east and to the west, and soon became embroiled in the conflicts of these two giants. The young boy had to experience first German and then Russian occu