Igor Stravinsky
Symphony in C
Igor Stravinsky was one of the most influential modern composers, with a career spanning five decades at the forefront of musical invention. Born in 1882 in Russia, he studied with Rimsky-Korsakov and first came to prominence composing works for Sergey Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes, including The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911), and The Rite of Spring (1913). The Rite was considered so ‘barbaric’ in its harmonic and rhythmic ferocity that it caused a riot at its premiere. Though influenced both by his Russian master and by Debussy and Ravel, the works are notably Stravinsky’s in the insistent, irregular rhythms and the bright, clean instrumentation that became his hallmarks.
Having made an indelible first impression, Stravinsky moved to smaller chamber works, such as the jazz-influenced Ragtime (1917) and The Soldier’s Tale (1918), and pieces that focused on the crisp sound of wind, percussion, and piano, such as the Symphonies of Winds (1920). The ballet Pulcinella (1920), based on music ascribed to the 18th-century composer Pergolesi, began his neoclassical period. Here he reinvented the forms of the past, from the oratorios of Handel recalled in Oedipus Rex (1927) to echoes of Mozart in his opera The Rake’s Progress (1951). Yet the references were ironic, for he set in classic developmental structures his distinct, non-developmental “blocks” of melody.
After 30 years of neoclassicism, in the late 1950’s Stravinsky was encouraged by conductor Robert Craft to study works by serialist composers Webern and Schönberg. Soon Stravinsky created his own personal style of serialism, from the astringent yet tonally-based ballet Agon (1957) to the detached, concentrated style of the Requiem Canticles (1965). He continued to compose into his mid-80s, and died in 1971 at age 88 in New York.
The Symphony in C is a work planted firmly in Stravinsky’s neoclassical period — and in a time of personal turmoil. Shortly after he began the work in late 1938 his daughter died of tuberculosis; this was followed in March of 1939 with the death of his wife, and his mother’s death in June. He continued work on the symphony, however, and by August had completed the first two movements. He then left Paris for the United States to give lectures at Harvard. In January 1940 he was joined in New York by Vera de Bossett (with whom he had begun an affair in 1921), and in March they were married. He and Vera traveled to California and settled in Beverly Hills, where he completed the last movement of the symphony in August 1940. He conducted the first performance that November with the Chicago Symphony, which had commissioned the piece.
Outwardly Stravinsky’s most traditional work, this symphony presents the standard four movements in typical sequence: allegro, slow movement, scherzo, finale. However, the work is as abrupt in its changes from one section to another as any of his less traditional pieces. It has been described as a “cubist portait” of a symphony, with passages in approximately the right places yet looked at from disjoint angles, the way a Picasso portrait has eyes, nose, mouth, in the correct general position but without consistent perspective applied to each. Having composed the first two movements in France, the last two in America, Stravinsky maintained that there were distinctly European and American halves to the symphony; the first half is perhaps more ‘classical’ in sound.
The Moderato alla breve begins with strings declaring the rhythmic insistence pervading the movement (Stravinsky noted this was the longest single movement he wrote without a change in time signature). The main theme, heard first from the oboe, revolves around G rather than C, and is built on a B–C–G chord that is a transposition of the chord in the final movement of Stravinsky’s earlier Symphony of Psalms (1930). Lyrical passages in the winds contrast with the urgency of the pulsing strings, and the movement ends with a repeated sonic punch from the full ensemble.
Stravinsky called the Larghetto concertante an “aria,” with a tune stated mainly by the oboe and recalling Bach in its ornamental line. Eventually the strings interrupt with an agitated theme, soon moderated by brass and woodwinds. Melody has the last word, and the section ends quietly in a three-note rhythm immediately echoed by the low strings at the start of the next movement, the Allegretto. This vigorous scherzo is built on the brisk repetition of a fourth, and is the only movement that abounds in Stravinsky’s typical changes in time signature. The central section uses a form even older than the classical in a Baroque dance, the passepied. The driving rhythms of the beginning relax at the end, the strings restating the original fourth softly and at half speed.
The finale begins slowly (Largo) with the bassoon chanting quietly against an augmented fourth from the brass that demands to resolve to C — but instead builds to a burst, introducing the Tempo guisto, alla breve. The angular motif sounds over rising or falling fragments that aim for the tonic C or the dominant G. Finally the original chord presses, crescendos, and drops, leaving the theme to be repeated ever more slowly until, with several long pulses, the piece fades to an combination of the C and G chords, rather than the simple C-major expected from a “Symphony in C.” Whereas in a classical symphony we might have traveled from doubt to certainty, Stravinsky’s work is finally modern in its view that, after all, there really is no absolute destination.
February 27, 2001