Stravinsky, Symphony in C

The Czech writer Milan Kundera described Stravinsky’s life of exile as someone who adopted the landscape of old music as his homeland and did all he could to feel at home by lingering in each of the rooms in his musical mansion, touching every corner and stroking every piece of furniture. This image certainly fits in with a lot of the things that go on in the Symphony in C, composed in 1938-40 and premiered by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1940, and one can even see the Symphony as a journey through Stravinsky’s mansion.

To start with, the piece does not begin in the key it is said to be in – a trait that is shared with works by Haydn and Mozart, and most notably with Beethoven’s 5^th Symphony. However, Stravinsky was not content with merely reproducing stylistic features and he carried through the musical argument between E minor (the key he started with) and C major (the key we are supposed to be in) right till the end of the 1^st movement and picked it up again in the 4^th movement. This is more a critique than an imitation of the German approach to composing, and by leaving the argument unresolved at the end he raised a question against the old masters as to the validity of the concept of tonic or a home key. The inner movements are more light-hearted and the 3^rd is particularly playful. It starts with a style of writing that harks back to his Russian ballets and then out of nowhere we see Stravinsky writing a Beethovenian fugue, followed by something straight out of Dvorak’s New World, and also bits of Gabrieli. The finale, in addition to being a continuation of the 1^st movement, is also another example of Stravinsky opening up a conversation with old musical concepts and this time the subject is the passacaglia. The essence of a passacaglia is in its persistence on a harmonic progression and the eschewal of contrasts. Here Stravinsky provides an alternative by insisting on the rhythmic side of things and whilst most passacaglias unfold its content over time, this one crystallises its material back to the principle theme of the 1^st movement.

October 2012