Krzysztof Penderecki – Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima

• Theme: War, destruction, sonic trauma

• Musical Essence: Scored for 52 string instruments using extended techniques; features glissandi, tone clusters, sustained screams, percussive effects, and microtonality; originally titled 8'37" and renamed upon completion; evokes the atomic destruction of Hiroshima through abstract, violent sound structures

Thinking Through Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)’s Philosophy on Art Essence

This is not music in the traditional sense. There is no harmony, no theme, no resolution. There is only the event—brutal, direct, impossible to soften. Nietzsche, who disdained the prettified lies of late Romanticism, would listen to Threnody with solemn awe. This work does not hide. It does not explain. It shows.

It shows, through shrieks and howls, what it means when the will to power is divorced from any moral constraint. It shows the Dionysian truth of destruction—not the joyful ecstasy of mythic rapture, but the modernized, mechanized orgy of death, where Prometheus no longer brings fire, but becomes the firestorm.

“Man is a rope stretched between beast and Übermensch—a rope over an abyss.”

Threnody sounds like the moment the rope snaps.

Penderecki does not narrate the event of Hiroshima. He recreates its impact through sound: siren-like glissandi, bone-scraping harmonics, clouds of sound that do not resonate but tear, claw, vibrate against the body. The strings do not play—they scream, moan, erupt. The performers become instruments of trauma, and the listener is made to endure.

Nietzsche would see this not as nihilism, but as aesthetic heroism. For Penderecki refuses the comfort of abstraction. There is no allegory. There is no hidden message. The music is the wound itself—and by shaping it into form, however violent, the composer refuses to let the horror become silence.

And this, Nietzsche would say, is the new tragic artist: not the weaver of myth, but the architect of sonic exposure, who forces the audience to see what civilization has become.

“Art is the highest task and the proper metaphysical activity of this life.”

But here, metaphysics has burned. In its place, we are left with pure phenomenology of pain. And yet Penderecki does not leave us with chaos. The work is meticulously structured. Even the scream is scored. The irrational is contained within the frame of rational creation—and this, for Nietzsche, is the essence of great art: to take the unbearable truth, and shape it into something we can confront without retreating.

Threnody ends not with peace, but with evaporation. The sound does not resolve. It fades—as radiation might, as memory might, as history might. There is no moral. There is no “lesson.” Only the fact of destruction, held in sonic clarity, without excuse.

Nietzsche would not call this beautiful. He would call it necessary.

Because art, for Nietzsche, is not there to soothe. It is there to bear what the mind cannot, to reveal the depths beneath culture’s mask, and—when needed—to scream in harmony.

In Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima, Penderecki has composed not the song of mourning, but the music of what should never have been possible. And in that, Nietzsche would bow his head—not in reverence, but in recognition: This is what it means to make art after the end of meaning.