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1964: Abraham and Isaac
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 February 2010
Extract
Stravinsky's ‘Sacred Ballad for Baritone and Chamber Orchestra’ is his only setting of Hebrew, his only work for solo voice on a religious text, and, indeed, his only ‘ballad’. Completed in 1963 and dedicated to the people of the State of Israel, it is the fifth in the late series of major religious works which began with the Canticum Sacrum of 1956. Its other predecessors are Threni (1958), A Sermon, A Narrative and A Prayer (1961), and The Flood (1962); its solitary successor is the Requiem Canticles of 1966.
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- Four Studies
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1971
References
1 See Perspectives on Schoenberg and Stravinsky (ed. Boretz and Cone), Princeton University Press, 1968. Certain fundamental points made by Spies in this essay are amplified in his essays on the Orchestral Variations and Requiem Canticles, which are to be found in the same volume.
2 The sound of sul pont. tremolos is one that Stravinsky has tended to associate with the numinous ever since Zvezdoliki (where sul tasto tremolos are equally prominent)—cf. The Flood bars 180–246. Comparable passages in works with mythical or legendary subjects generally feature the ordinary mode of tremolo. See the Apotheosis in Apollo and fig. 36 in Orpheus (‘The Angel leads Orpheus to Hades’).
3 The combination of flutes and trombones is typically Stravinskian. See, for instance, the Symphony of Psalmsthree bars before fig. 20, and again at the start of the third movement; also Agon (bars 148–253) and the ‘Sensus Spei’ section of Threni. There are many examples in The Flood. In the ‘Lacrimosa’ of the Requiem Canticles, four high flutes (including piccolo and alto flutes) alternate with low, and muted, trombones.
4 Messiaen's term seems appropriate. Abraham and Isaac is the first late-Stravinsky work in which there is any technical affinity with Messiaen's music—see also the rhythmic structure of Ex. 1a (and of its rhythmically independent accompaniment). The next such work was the Orchestral Variations, with its serial retorts to the ornithological ‘Epode’ of Chronochromie.
5 See his article ‘Thematicism in Stravinsky's Abraham and Isaac’, Tempo 89.Google Scholar
6 The orchestra's last three notes are F natural (E sharp,) D sharp and C sharp. Throughout the work, F natural has a dominant-like role in relationship to C sharp. The vocal line begins on that note (doubled an octave lower by the trombone), and so do three of the work's five canons. In the fourth canon, the tuba as dux begins on C sharp simultaneously with the voice on F natural. The flute follows with its inversion in diminution, beginning on C sharp. (Voice and flute are in cancrizans as to pitch but in direct canon as to rhythm.)