TPDVD102 - Gorecki The Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. The Symphony actually dates from 1976 when Górecki was (as he tells us in the film) a 'non-person' in the political sense, when his music was banned in his native Katowice in Poland. He told me that its inspiration had come from a book he had found about the Nazi occupation of Poland. In the footnotes there was an example of the different messages scratched on the walls of a Gestapo prison.