Symphony No. 7 (Penderecki)

Krzysztof Penderecki wrote his Seventh Symphony, subtitled "Seven Gates of Jerusalem," in 1996 to commemorate the third millennium of the city of Jerusalem. Originally conceived as an oratorio, this choral symphony was premièred in Jerusalem in January 1997; it was only after the first Polish performance two months later that Penderecki decided to call it a symphony. It is written for two sopranos, alto, tenor, bass, narrator, chorus and orchestra.

The symphony is written in seven movements and lasts approximately 60 minutes:

In 1995 Penderecki was commissioned to write a work to commemorate the third millennium of Jerusalem, a city the composer had first visited in 1974 in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War. Penderecki decided to write an oratorio titled Seven Gates of Jerusalem (there is an eighth "golden" gate but, according to Jewish tradition, this is reserved for the arrival of the Messiah). Penderecki composed the work between April and December 1996. The work was premiered in Jerusalem on 9 January 1997; the orchestra included members of the Jerusalem Symphony and Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestras, conducted by Lorin Maazel. The Polish premiere followed on 14 March 1997, under the direction of Kazimierz Kord. It was only after the Polish performance that the composer decided to call the work his Seventh Symphony, though he had not yet completed his Sixth Symphony (the latter, though fully worked out in concept, remains a work in progress). The composer has since also written an Eighth Symphony, which like the Seventh is a choral symphony.

In categorizing the work, James L. Zychowicz writes in his review:

This work also belongs to the choral symphony of the nineteenth century, reminiscent in a sense of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony for its use of voices throughout the work. Similarly, Mahler’s efforts to bring together different texts—in the case of the Eighth Symphony, the Latin hymn “Veni creator spiritus” and the final scene from the second part of Goethe’s Faust, Penderecki combined verses from various psalms, as well as different parts of the Old Testament. Psalms and prophetic texts are brought together in this Jerusalem–inspired work which, in this sense, reflects those aspects of the old city as a place of worship and a locus of prophetic vision. In this sense, it is a return to those seventeenth-century composers, whose works use large forces along with concertato sonorities to present biblical texts, but conceived along much larger lines.

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