Threni: Lamentations of Jeremiah composed 1957-58
At a Glance Stravinsky wrote his Threni in 1957-58 for the Vienna Biennale. The first performance took place on September 23, 1958, in Venice, with North German Radio Symphony and Chorus conducted by the composer. This work runs about 35 minutes in performance. Stravinsky scored it for 2 flutes, 2 oboes, english horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, contrabassoon
by
IGOR
STRAVINSKY born June 17, 1882 Oranienbaum, near St. Petersburg died April 6, 1971 New York
Severance Hall 2016-17
(sarrusophone), 4 horns, 3 trombones, flugelhorn, tuba, timpani, percussion (tam-tam), harp, piano, celesta, and strings, along with chorus and six vocal soloists: soprano, contralto, two tenors, bass, and basso profundo. The Cleveland Orchestra is playing this work for the first time with this weekend's concerts.
About the Music S T R A V I N S K Y ’ S next change of direction, after his long neoclassical period, could not have been more surprising. Having completed the opera The Rake’s Progress, his largest work yet, in 1951, he may have felt that he had exhausted that style and was ready for something different. Shortly afterwards, Schoenberg died. Although the two composers had known each other in Berlin before World War I, they had lived in California within ten miles of each other for eleven years and had gotten together only once, at Franz Werfel’s funeral, without exchanging a word. Stravinsky had shown a tentative interest in Schoenberg’s style of serial (or twelve-tone) composition for a number of years. Between 1952 and 1955, he made a deeper study of the technique, with a special admiration for the music of Anton Webern (one of Schoenberg’s protégés). Stravinsky's new compositions at this time tread gradually closer to serialism, and in Threni, composed between the summer of 1957 and March 1958, he wrote his first wholly serial work. A single twelve-note row, which lacks any symmetrical features or thematic “hooks,” supplies all the notes of this composition — by drawing on its basic form, its retrograde (played backwards), its inverted form, and its retrograde inversion. Very few listeners are able to hear the mechanics by which such a composition is put together. However, certain intervals may become familiar while listening — and the rigor of the style is an assurance, for the composer at least, that the work is unified and solid. Raised in the Russian Orthodox church, Stravinsky had a
About the Music
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