Programme Notes
IGOR FYODOROVICH STRAVINSKY 1882-
SYMPHONY IN C
Moderato alla breve
Larghetto concertante
Allegretto
Adagio
No less than Berlioz's Nuits d'été, Stravinsky's Symphony in C belongs to a crucial
period in the composer's life. It was begun as a result of a commission, and a fee
of $1,500, from Mr and Mrs Robert Wood Bliss, the Washington, DC, couple for whom
Stravinsky had already written the Dumbarton Oaks concerto (1938). Robert Bliss had
made a fortune from the sale of a cough medicine, by the name of Castoria ('an evil-
Now, however, it was 1939. Stravinsky's personal circumstances were about to change radically. Europe was on the brink of war, and in addition a series of calamities struck the composer's family. His elder daughter, Ludmila, had died the previous year of tuberculosis and that was followed by the death, from the same disease, of his first wife, Catherine Nossenko, in March 1939. Three months later, his mother died.
Finding some solace in work, Stravinsky completed the first movement in Paris in the autumn of 1938, then, anxious about his own health, went to the sanatorium in Sancellemoz in Switzerland in which his daughter and his wife had been treated; there he wrote the second movement of the symphony, the Larghetto concertante. It was finished in July: but soon afterwards came news of French mobilisation. With his companion Vera Sudeikina, the distraught composer took the next train to Paris, in time to hear the sirens sounding the first warning of an air raid. It was a false alarm, but Stravinsky, said Vera, was in 'a terrible state of nerves,' and a few days later he sailed on the SS Manhattan for New York. Vera joined him a few weeks later, and they were married on 9th March in Bedford, Massachusetts.
In due course came the symphony's Allegretto, written in Cambridge, Mass., and at
last the finale, which he wrote in Beverley Hills, California; and this piecemeal
symphony was completed on the 28th April. With Mrs Bliss' approval, he offered the
work to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in celebration of their fiftieth concert season:
cannily enough, he earned an extra $1,000 by selling the MS -
At first, other conductors were suspicious of the piece, an exception being Leopold Stokowski, who gave a broadcast performance with the NBC Symphony Orchestra in 1943, which Stravinsky disliked: he thought the slow movement horribly dragged and the third too much for Stokowski's technique. No one, including the conductor, appeared to notice that the bassoon solos, though impeccably played, were in the wrong clef. It was not until 1948 that a public performance was given in New York, conducted by the man who was to become an important figure in Stravinsky's life, Robert Craft.
The Symphony in C, in short, had a faltering start, with its unfortunate performance
history and its four movements involving four distinct places in two continents.
That need not have mattered, although Stravinsky maintained there was a marked difference
in style between the first two and the last two movements. Not all critics have agreed
with this, Robert Craft among them: but he still found the 'American' movements freer
and more experimental. The composer and critic Virgil Thomson described the symphony
as 'a compound of grace and of brusqueness thoroughly Russian in its charm and its
rudeness and so utterly sophisticated intellectually that few musicians of intellectual
bent can resist it.' That was in 1948, after Craft's concert. Over fifty years later
the appeal of the Symphony in C is by no means restricted to specialist musicians.
It is one of the most important pieces in the composer's neo-
Programme Notes by Paul Vaughan ©
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