Igor Stravinsky
Symphony in C

Music history knows no other composer as versatile as Igor Stravinsky. Like a snake shedding its skin as it grows, he reinvented his style every few years. This can already be seen at the outset of his career: trained by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, he soon left behind the tradition of Russian romanticism by combining it with the refined harmonies and sparkling sonorities of French impressionism. Then came another radical turn: to bring the archaic subject of a pagan human sacrifice to the ballet stage, he created in Le Sacre du printemps a raw, brutal music. Its Paris premiere in 1913 even descended into fistfights among the audience.

A few years later, the trend now prevailing in his output was labelled – somewhat misleadingly – neoclassicism. Together with his compatriot Sergei Prokofiev, Stravinsky pioneered a sound that eschewed sonic intoxication and emotional extremes in favour of modern objectivity and sobriety. The models were the “sewing-machine” regularity of baroque concerti grossi and the compact classical symphonies of Joseph Haydn, spiced with jazz and the fashionable dances of the Roaring Twenties, such as the foxtrot and tango.

It was from this phase and spirit that the deliberately plain-titled Symphony in C emerged – a genre that, in fact, played little part in Stravinsky’s oeuvre. In formal terms, the work follows to the letter the blueprint of a classical symphony, but its content is enlivened by supple rhythms, razor-sharp wind writing, and glittering colours. There are no direct quotations; rather, Stravinsky plays with seemingly familiar fragments that continually lead the listener astray.

This absolute, self-contained style appears all the more remarkable when one recalls Stravinsky’s circumstances at the time. The Communist Revolution had driven him from Russia to France, the First World War into Switzerland, the isolation he experienced in Switzerland back to France – and the Second World War was to carry him, shortly after completing the Symphony in C, to the United States. While working on the piece, within just half a year his daughter Ludmilla, his wife Yekaterina and his mother Anna all died of tuberculosis; Stravinsky himself was also infected. Yet, as he later reported, only his work on the symphony enabled him to “carry on with my own life. I did not try to overcome my grief by portraying it in music or giving it expression, and you will look in vain for traces of such personal emotion in this work.”

Nevertheless, the composition – commissioned by an American patron of the arts to mark the 50th anniversary of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and premiered there – paved Stravinsky’s way into American exile. Once settled in Hollywood, living virtually next door to such prominent émigrés as Arnold Schoenberg, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Theodor W. Adorno and Thomas Mann, he once again changed direction, embracing the rigours of serialism.

But that is another story.