The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Igor Stravinsky · Symphonie de psaumes, for mixed chorus and orchestra, on Latin texts from the Vulgate psalter · three movements, on Psalms 38, 39 and 150 in the Vulgate numbering · about twenty-two minutes in performance
Mode
Sacred choral symphony; Latin psalms set syllabically, without expression, for chorus and an orchestra without violins, violas or clarinets
Mythos
Plea, waiting and rescue, then the new song: the stranger before God, the pit and the rock, and the praise of every instrument and every spirit
Phase
Three movements, each about twice the length of the last; from the plea through the waiting to the praise, ending in stillness
Presentation
Concert music; a score in three movements for four-part mixed chorus and an orchestra of winds, brass, harp, two pianos, timpani, bass drum, cellos and double basses
Register
From a dry staccato chord and a chant a semitone wide to a double fugue, a galloping Allegro and a hushed hymn; austerity, grandeur and awe
Scale
One stranger, one chorus, one cosmos at praise; eleven verses in some twenty-two minutes
Governing Proposition
A stranger asks to be heard before he goes, a chorus waits in a double fugue for the Lord who lifts it from the pit, and the new song it is promised is sung at last, slowly, over a figure that turns and never comes round. The wager of the work is that praise is an act and not a feeling, and that a symphony can be made of the singing itself, with nothing above the voices to console them.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The work begins with a chord, struck and cut off: E minor, short and dry, spaced wide, the full ensemble sounding it with the third, G, doubled and prominent. It returns through the movement as punctuation. The orchestra that strikes it has no violins, no violas and no clarinets; of the strings only cellos and double basses remain. The weight is in the woodwind and brass, with harp, two pianos, timpani and bass drum. Before a voice is heard the colour is set: hard light, and nothing above it to sing.
The chorus enters with the altos on two notes a semitone apart, E and F, a narrow chant on Exaudi orationem meam: hear my prayer. The words are the Vulgate’s, Psalm 38 in its numbering, 39 in the Hebrew and English, verses 13 and 14. They are set syllabically, often on a single note, spaced and repeated, and in places against the classical quantities of the Latin, by design. The chant does not swell. The plea is made, and the music does not tell the hearer what the man who makes it feels.
Stravinsky called the work a symphony, and in his own account he meant by it not a symphony into which psalms are put to be sung, but the singing of the psalms made symphonic. The chorus is the subject, not an addition to an orchestral argument. The first movement is the shortest of the three. It states its chord, its ostinato and its chant, and stops. Nothing in it is ornament, and what it leaves open, a need with no answer yet, is what the rest of the work exists to meet.
Movement II
The man of the first psalm names himself: advena ego sum, I am a guest, a stranger, a pilgrim passing through. He asks to be spared a little before he goes and is no more. This is the condition the whole work answers. It is not a people in crisis or a soul in agony but a mortal in transit, asking only to be heard, and the psalm gives him two verses.
The music refuses him the pathos the words might seem to invite. The chant moves by a semitone; the orchestra answers with its dry chord. No line rises above the voices to console them, because the instruments that would carry such a line are absent from the score. The objectivity is the stance of the work: it holds that praise and petition are acts a creature performs, not feelings it displays, and it sets the stranger’s plea in a manner that will not dramatise it.
The road to this manner was Stravinsky’s own. He had returned to the Russian Orthodox Church in 1926 and that year set the Pater Noster in Slavonic. Oedipus Rex, in 1927, had used Latin as a language set apart, and stillness as a dramatic mode. Les Noces had joined chorus with pianos and percussion. The symphony draws these together and makes them sacred, in 1930, when many modernists took his neoclassicism for a retreat from the composer of The Rite of Spring.
Movement III
The second movement is a double fugue, and it begins without voices. The woodwind alone set out the first subject, one instrument entering after another, the lines laid in counterpoint with no upper strings to soften them. It is learned music, and austere, and it is where a symphony would ordinarily develop its material: here the development is a fugue, and the fugue is the form of waiting.
The chorus enters with a second subject on Expectans expectavi Dominum, Psalm 39 in the Vulgate, 40 in the Hebrew and English, verses 2 to 4: I waited and waited for the Lord. While the voices take up their fugue, the instrumental fugue continues against it in the orchestra, subject over subject. The psalm tells of a rescue: the Lord heard, brought the singer up out of the pit, de lacu miseriae, set his feet upon a rock, and put a new song in his mouth.
The movement ends on those words, canticum novum, the new song, held without resolution. The song is promised and not yet sung. The second movement is about twice the length of the first, as the waiting is longer than the cry, and its last words are the hinge on which the work turns: what follows is the song they name.
Movement IV
The third movement sets Psalm 150 whole, and it is as long as the other two together. It begins slowly and quietly, on Alleluia. Laudate Dominum: praise the Lord. After the fugue’s long accumulation the new song does not burst out. Praise begins in a hush, nearly a whisper, as if the singers had to learn it.
Then the Allegro. Trumpets and pianos drive a galloping music in blocks, and the grandeur is the grandeur of force. Stravinsky wrote that the fast music was suggested to him by the image of Elijah’s chariot climbing to heaven. Between the blocks the quiet Laudate Dominum returns, so that the ascent is cut again and again by the stillness it is climbing towards.
The blocks are where the form gives most. Their order is arranged rather than compelled, and a statement of the galloping music, or one of the quiet interjections, could go without loss to the argument; some of the block writing is mechanical by Stravinsky’s own best standard. The movement does not rest its weight here. The Allegro is the road, and the road ends in something else.
Movement V
The coda is slow and in E flat. Under it the harp, the two pianos and the timpani play an ostinato of four notes against a metre of three, so that the pattern turns and does not come round to the downbeat in the same place. It is held for minutes without monotony. Over it the chorus sings the psalm’s last verses, and the cymbal verse, in cymbalis benesonantibus, praise on the well-sounding cymbals, is set as the quietest music in the work. Praise here is stillness, and its sublime is awe rather than exaltation: eternity rendered as a pattern that never arrives.
At the close the chorus returns to Alleluia. Laudate Dominum, and the work settles on C major. The E minor of the first chord and the E flat of the coda are the major and minor thirds of that C, and the work’s two outer colours are thus heard, at the end, as one law. Whether the coda is serenity or terror is still argued, and the score does not decide it.
Serge Koussevitzky commissioned the work for the fiftieth anniversary of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The printed dedication puts the symphony to la gloire de DIEU and the orchestra’s jubilee on one page. It was first performed in Brussels on 13 December 1930 under Ernest Ansermet, and Koussevitzky gave it in Boston within the week. Stravinsky recorded it as conductor in Paris in 1931 and again in Toronto in 1963, and revised the score in 1948; the revised score is the one in general use. It entered the repertory at once, and it has been sung since in concert halls and in churches.
Act III · The Twelve
Some twenty-two minutes on eleven verses, and the subtractive test meets resistance almost everywhere. Remove the first movement and the work loses the stranger’s plea, the condition the rest answers; the second movement’s last words, canticum novum, would promise a song with no need behind it. Remove the second and the work passes from plea to praise with no waiting and no rescue from the pit, de lacu miseriae. The third is the new song the second promised; it cannot go. Within movements the economy is severe. The give is in the Allegro, where a statement of the galloping blocks or a Laudate interjection could go without loss of argument, and in the coda, which could lose a cycle and keep its effect.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The disclosure can be stated: praise is not the expression of a feeling but an act a creature performs, and it is the stranger, the mortal who will soon be gone, who is asked to perform it. The man of the first psalm calls himself a guest and a pilgrim, advena ego sum, and asks for respite before he goes. The music refuses him pathos: the chant moves by a semitone, and the orchestra answers with a dry chord. The answer in the last movement is not consolation but praise held still over a turning bass. Credited in full as disclosure through sound. Held down because the propositions are the psalmist’s, and the objectivity the music adds is nearer a stance than a disclosed condition.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Height reaches near the ceiling, and for a short work the rises are frequent. The opening chord is a shock of hard light; the chorus’s first chant is elevation by restraint. The double fugue rises by accumulation to the choral entry and the held new song. The last movement gives three summits: the hushed first Laudate Dominum; the Allegro’s grandeur of force; and the coda, slow, in E flat, over a four-note ostinato, praise as stillness, a sublime of awe rather than exaltation and one of the great passages of the century’s music. Held below the top because the first movement and the fugue are austere by design, rising by severity rather than transport, and because in so short a work the summits stand close together.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The archetype is built, and the structure carries it: plea, waiting and rescue, then the new song sung. Three psalms are chosen and ordered to make a passage from the stranger’s cry through the pit and the rock to praise, and the hinge is literal: the second movement ends on the promise of a canticum novum, and the third is that song. A second figure is built in the coda, where the driving ascent of the Allegro gives way to eternity rendered as four notes turning against a metre of three, never arriving. The particular holds: the semitone chant, the empty upper strings, the cymbal verse set as the quietest music in the work. Held below 9.0 because the archetypal material comes whole with the psalter; the work builds an ordering and a rendering of it, not a new figure.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The inheritance is the choral symphony and the sacred concert work: Beethoven’s Ninth, Mahler, the oratorio. The departures are several: a symphony in which the chorus is the subject, not an addition; an orchestra stripped of violins, violas and clarinets and weighted on winds, brass, two pianos and harp; a fugue at the centre of a symphony; ritual Latin, set against its quantities; and a sacred work of 1930 that refuses expression, by the composer of The Rite of Spring, when modernists took his neoclassicism for retreat. The stake was real in standing, not in livelihood: the commission was secure. Held below the top because the road was his own. Les Noces had joined chorus with pianos and percussion, and Oedipus Rex had made Latin a ritual language and stillness a dramatic mode. The swerve is the synthesis, made sacred.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Change the form and the work stops knowing what it knows. The three movements grow, each roughly twice the length of the last, and the growth is the passage from plea to praise: the cry is brief, the waiting longer, the song longest. The fugue is the form of waiting, expectans expectavi, subject entering after subject and the choral fugue arriving over the instrumental one. The coda’s ostinato, in a metre it does not fit, is the form of eternity: a pattern that turns and does not come round to the downbeat in the same place. The orchestration is form too: without violins there is no singing line above the chorus, and the voices are the only warmth. Recast as an orchestral symphony with a choral finale, the work would lose its claim that the singing is the symphony. Held below the top where the Allegro’s blocks are arranged rather than compelled.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Evidence, not promise, and more than nine decades of it. Performance questions stay open: the tempo of the coda, how dry the opening chord should be, how the composer’s own two recordings as conductor, made in 1931 and 1963, bear on practice. The analytic return is long: Pieter van den Toorn’s The Music of Igor Stravinsky (1983), Richard Taruskin’s Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions (1996) on its Russian and Orthodox roots, and a steady literature on its text-setting and its theology. What it means to praise without feeling, and whether the coda is serenity or terror, are still argued. Held below the top because the literature on Stravinsky gathers on The Rite of Spring, Les Noces and the late serial works, and this score’s share, large among the neoclassical works, is smaller.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in a field, the concert music of 1920 to 1940, where the neoclassical turn was the main contest. The force is high: the work showed that the anti-expressive, objective idiom of neoclassicism could carry the sacred at full weight, and that a modern composer could write liturgical gravity without Romantic religiosity or archaism. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is real and lasting, more in choral and sacred music than across the field. The modern psalm setting and the objective sacred style run from it as a line, and its orchestra without violins, with two pianos, became a resource. But the reorganisation of the field in Stravinsky’s name belongs mainly to The Rite of Spring and to neoclassicism as a whole, and this work holds a part of it, not the whole.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the score survives complete in the composer’s revision, with no doubtful text and no lost part. Presence has been continuous since 1930. The work entered the repertory at once, has been recorded from 1931 to the present, and is among the most performed choral and orchestral works of the twentieth century, in concert halls and in churches. Nothing in the fabric is lost, and the instruments are standard. The surface fixed to its moment is small: the neoclassical manner dates it to a period but reads now as its idiom, not as fashion. Ninety-six years on, its presence is wide, though a work for large forces, heard in concert and church, is not present in the widest way.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The making bears weight throughout. The scoring: no upper strings, the doubled third of the opening chord, the woodwind fugue, trumpets and pianos driving the Allegro, harp, pianos and timpani under the coda. The double fugue: two subjects worked together, the instrumental fugue continuing against the choral one. The coda’s ostinato: a four-note figure set against the metre and held for minutes without monotony. The text-setting: syllabic and spaced, every syllable placed. The economy: no doubling for weight, no filler line. The costs are small. Some of the Allegro’s block writing is mechanical by Stravinsky’s own best standard, and the Latin accentuation, though deliberate, is a cost a hearer can hear.
Score: 9.6 / 10
Take the two most distant elements, the dry, staccato E minor chord that opens the work and the still E flat of the coda. One law governs them, and its unit is the third. The opening chord is spaced to sound its third, G, doubled and prominent; the coda’s E flat and the opening’s E are the minor and major thirds of the C on which the work ends. A second law governs the manner: stillness against motion, the fixed figure against the moving voice, in the ostinato of the first movement, the entries of the fugue and the pattern of the coda. The range it governs runs from plea and lament through learned counterpoint and galloping force to hushed hymn. Held below the top because the range is a short work’s range: the law is proved over some twenty-two minutes, not over an evening.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The orders held are few and integrated: the sacred, as the work’s whole matter; mortality and the soul, in the stranger who will soon be gone; the community of worship, in a chorus that sings as a body and never as a person; the institution, lightly, in a work made for an orchestra’s jubilee and to the glory of God; and the cosmos, in the last psalm’s every instrument and every spirit. The order of the three psalms holds them together; they are not listed. What holds the axis here is the form and its absences: the family, labour, the state and history as lived do not appear. A short sacred work holds the creature and its praise, more than a wordless quartet can and far fewer orders than an epic.
Score: 7.5 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.9 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.6, then The Living Form at 9.3 and The Sublime and The Inner Law at 9.2. A score whose scoring, double fugue, coda ostinato and text-setting bear weight in every bar; a form that grows from plea to praise, each movement about twice the last, with the fugue as the form of waiting and the coda’s turning figure as the form of eternity; and one law of the third governing the first chord and the last.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.5: a short sacred work holds the sacred, mortality, the worshipping body, the institution lightly and the cosmos, but the family, labour, the state and history as lived are absent. Below the rest, The Unconcealment at 8.6, where the disclosure stays close to the psalmist’s own; and The Swerve, The Archetypal Deep and Pressure on Tradition at 8.7 each, where the swerve runs along the composer’s own road, the archetype comes with the text, and the reach is shared with The Rite of Spring and the neoclassical turn.
The Necessity Cap clears at 9.0 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 9.6, The Living Form at 9.3, The Inner Law at 9.2, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five, four of them by two tenths or less: The Imperishable at 9.1 clears the bar of 8.5 with room; The Archetypal Deep, The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition each clear it at 8.7, by two tenths; and The Unconcealment clears it at 8.6, by a tenth. The Universal Minimum is met: of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 8.6, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.5. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone.
Basis · the score of the Symphonie de psaumes in its standard performing version, Stravinsky’s revision of 1948, with its Latin texts from the Vulgate psalter, and its performance tradition, read from knowledge under the desk’s convention for concert music; no score, edition or recording was in hand, and the running time is an approximate figure across the recorded tradition, not a measurement. The three movements with their psalm texts are scored as one work; the texts set are part of the work and are read in Latin; no single performance or recording is the object. Psalm numbers follow the Vulgate, with the Hebrew and English numbering beside them. Latin is quoted only in short fragments of four words or fewer; the English glosses are the desk’s own plain renderings, made for sense, and no published translation is quoted. Stravinsky’s statements about the work are given in substance, not in his words. The proportions of the movements were computed by script from approximate durations. Figures that could not be verified are not given, among them the date of the Boston performance, the details of the 1948 revision, the counts of the wind instruments, the composer’s wishes for the upper voices, whether the movements are joined without a break, the notes of the fugue subject, the key on which each of the first two movements closes, the ensembles of the composer’s later recording, and the later works said to descend from this one. The sound of the work as heard is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged.