Music: Serial Success

Most of Europe’s major critics and a big-name-studded audience (Poet W. H. Auden, Composer Francis Poulenc et al.) braved a motorboat strike and journeyed by gondola to Venice’s 450-year-old Scuola di San Rocco, one of Italy’s famed Renaissance religious schools, for the fall’s most eagerly awaited musical event. In hushed expectation, beneath a Tintoretto ceiling, they watched 76-year-old Igor Stravinsky, with a clawlike motion of his right hand, launch the orchestra into the premiere of his latest work. What followed was some of the finest—and most complex—music of Stravinsky’s career.

The 33-minute work for six vocal soloists with chorus and full orchestra—but with no trumpets, and a Flügelhorn and alto trombone added—was presented by Venice’s International Festival of contemporary music. Stravinsky’s text and title—Threni, id est Lamentationes Jeremiae Prophetae (Threnody: Lamentations of the Prophet Jeremiah)—come from three of the familiar elegies from the Catholic Vulgate Bible. Written in the tone-row technique that Stravinsky once scorned but has lately adopted, the work has a spare, transparent orchestral accompaniment that for long stretches consists of no more than an occasional chord. To prepare the Hamburg Radio Chorus for the taxing job of staying on pitch while unaccompanied, Conductor Robert Craft rehearsed the group more than 20 times.

Threni opens with the chorus singing mournfully over the sighing orchestra, gradually builds to a moving tenor solo, accompanied by the Flügelhorn, to the text, “Behold, O Lord, for I am in distress.” In one passage of labyrinthine difficulty the two tenors and two basses sing two separate canons simultaneously. Except for the second section of the third elegy, the tempo is funereal, and throughout the mood is unrelievedly austere. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the piece is that despite the rigidities of the tone-row technique (and for the first time Stravinsky used all twelve tones), it is thoroughly suffused with Stravinskyan trademarks—harmonic juxtapositions, rhythmic ingenuities—that adorn such earlier works as Les Noces and Symphony of Psalms.

Summing it up, a TIME correspondent cabled from Venice: “An important, affecting work that will probably influence other composers who up to now have hesitated to attempt serial writing. It may never achieve real audience popularity, but it will rank with other infrequently done large works, such as Persephone and Oedipus Rex.” Added U.S. Composer Alexei Haieff: “What Stravinsky is writing is the best twelve-tone music in the world today.”