Polish born composer Henryk Mikołaj Górecki was largely unknown outside Poland until the mid-to-late 1980s. In 1992, 15 years after it was composed, a recording of Gorecki's Third Symphony was released and became a worldwide commercial and critical success, exceeding the typical lifetime sales of a recording of symphonic music by a 20th-century composer. According to critic Alex Ross, "no recent classical composer has had as much commercial success as Górecki." Gorecki was inspired by three polish texts of maternal love and separation through war that accompany each movement of his work and that are performed by a single soprano voice.