Symphony in Three Movements
Igor Fedorovich Stravinsky was born at Oranienbaum, Russia, on June 17, 1882, and died in New York City on April 6, 1971. He composed the Symphony in Three Movements between 1942 and 1945, dedicating it to the New York Philharmonic Symphony Society. Stravinsky led the New York Philharmonic in the first performance on January 24, 1946. He also led the first Boston Symphony Orchestra performances of the work, a month later, on February 20, 1946, in Cambridge and on February 22 and 23 in Symphony Hall.
The score of the Symphony in Three Movements calls for 2 flutes and piccolo, 2 oboes, 3 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, piano, harp, and strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos, and double basses).
It is curious that Igor Stravinsky, so closely associated with Russian themes, lived nearly as long in Los Angeles as he did in Russia — almost 30 years. He moved to southern California in June 1940, less than a year after arriving in the United States from Europe, and remained there until 1969, when he relocated to New York City. “If there ever was a home for Stravinsky, it was his house in West Hollywood,” former Los Angeles Philharmonic conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen has remarked. True, Stravinsky seems often to have viewed Los Angeles as little more than a way station, a sanctuary from the political turmoil and war that — inconveniently — kept disrupting his creative routine in Europe. More than anything, Stravinsky feared (in the words of his biographer Stephen Walsh) “being stranded on the wrong edge of civilization in the event of war or revolution.” Danger was not his thing. Los Angeles was about as far as the composer could get from the slaughter and mayhem that engulfed Europe and Russia after 1939.
One of the first major works for orchestra Stravinsky composed in the small house above Sunset Boulevard that he shared with his wife Vera was the Symphony in Three Movements. He completed it in 1945, the year the war finally ended and the year he became an American citizen. Of all the music he composed in Los Angeles, this powerful piece has the closest connection to the city, and to its best-known business — the movies.
Soon after he landed in Los Angeles, Stravinsky began receiving proposals from Hollywood studios to write music for film projects. In 1942 he was commissioned to produce a score for a film about the Nazi invasion of Norway, The Commandos Strike at Dawn, but he balked at changes requested by Columbia and was eventually replaced by Louis Gruenberg, whose score was nominated for an Academy Award. Stravinsky recycled the music he had written into Four Norwegian Moods, a marvelously evocative piece for orchestra that almost recalls the lonely Nordic world of the symphonies of Sibelius.
In 1943 Stravinsky was approached to write the score for the film The Song of Bernadette, based on a novel by Franz Werfel. Stravinsky and Vera had become friendly in Los Angeles with Werfel and his wife, Alma Mahler, and according to some sources it was Werfel who suggested Stravinsky for the project. Stravinsky began to write some music for the film, but once again he was unable to come to an agreement with the studio, and the assignment was handed over to the experienced film composer Alfred Newman (who won an Oscar for his score). Around the same time, Stravinsky considered — and eventually rejected — two other film projects, the scores for Jane Eyre and North Star. Produced by Sam Goldwyn to a silly pro-Soviet script by Lillian Hellman about the Nazi invasion of a small village in Ukraine, North Star was eventually scored by Aaron Copland, whose musical vision of Ukraine has a strong American accent.
But Stravinsky had another more serious project in mind during his first few years in Los Angeles — an orchestral composition that progressed rather episodically from three different sources and found its final form as the Symphony in Three Movements.
According to Alexander Tansman, Stravinsky initially thought of the piece as a “symphonic work with a concertante part for the piano” and played for him some music of this sort in 1942. “I thought of the work then as a concerto for orchestra,” Stravinsky told Robert Craft some years later. This conception subsequently evolved, however, into a three-movement piece, with the music already written for piano and orchestra forming only the first movement. For the second movement, Stravinsky recycled the music he had composed for The Song of Bernadette, for the scene “Apparition of the Virgin,” scored for solo harp with orchestra. The third and final movement was composed in 1945, and brings the harp and piano together with the orchestra.
Stravinsky was well aware that the prolonged genesis of the piece, and its disparate sources, resulted in a form that was not like that of a conventional symphony. “The formal substance of the Symphony — perhaps Three Symphonic Movements would be a more exact title — exploits the idea of counterplay among several types of contrasting elements,” he wrote in a 1963 program note. “One such contrast, the most obvious, is that of harp and piano, the principal instrumental protagonists.” But then none of Stravinsky’s mature works that include the word “symphony” in the title (Symphonies of Wind Instruments, Symphony of Psalms, Symphony in C) plays by the established rules of the genre.
In the same program note, Stravinsky also claims that the Symphony in Three Movements is a response to the events of World War II: “each episode in the Symphony is linked in my imagination with a concrete impression, very often cinematographic in origin, of the war.” The first movement, Stravinsky said, was “inspired by a war film, this time a documentary of scorched-earth tactics in China. The middle part of the movement — the music for clarinet, piano, and strings, which mounts in intensity and volume until the explosion of the three chords at No. 69 — was conceived as a series of instrumental conversations to accompany a cinematographic scene showing the Chinese people scratching and digging in their fields.” Newsreels and documentaries showing images of “goose-stepping soldiers” allegedly inspired the third movement (Con moto), with its “square march-beat, the brass-band instrumentation, the grotesque crescendo in the tuba…. The exposition of the fugue and the end of the Symphony are associated in my plot with the rise of the Allies and the final, albeit rather too commercial, D-flat sixth chord — instead of the expected C — tokens my extra exuberance in the Allied triumph.”
Stravinsky’s assertion that the Symphony in Three Movements had a specific program must be taken with a good deal of skepticism, however. It was very unlike Stravinsky, who always celebrated the abstract purity of music, to provide such a detailed explication, and he did so in this case only after the completion of the piece. Some observers have suggested that the program may have been the work more of Stravinsky’s associate and co-author Robert Craft than of the composer himself. The 1963 note also concludes with an important qualification: “In spite of what I have said, the Symphony is not programmatic. Composers combine notes. That is all. How and in what form the things of this world are impressed upon their music is not for them to say.”
One of the more unusual features of the Symphony in Three Movements is the use of a rumba rhythm at the start of the first movement in the piano part, with the meter changing each measure between 3/4 and 4/4, creating a dynamic, halting stop-and-start dance atmosphere accentuated by the piano’s ascending cluster chords. The metrical patterns here and in the subsequent movements are shifting and complex, reminding us of the younger Stravinsky of The Rite of Spring. In the second movement, in ABA form, the harmonic language is more stable, and the melodic writing for the solo harp with flute is more lyrical. A seven-bar Interlude leads directly into the third movement, which builds to an explosive conclusion with the return of the initial rumba rhythm.
Harlow Robinson
Harlow Robinson is an author, lecturer, and Matthews Distinguished University Professor of History, Emeritus, at Northeastern University. His books include Sergei Prokofiev: A Biography and Russians in Hollywood, Hollywood’s Russians. His essays and reviews have appeared in the Boston Globe, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Cineaste, and Opera News, and he has written program notes for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, and Metropolitan Opera.
The first Boston Symphony performances of the Symphony in Three Movements took place on February 20, 1946, at Sanders Theatre, Cambridge, and February 22-23 at Symphony Hall with Stravinsky conducting.
