Symphonizing the Psalms: Igor Stravinsky’s Musical Exegesis

The twentieth-century composer Igor Stravinsky’s setting of the psalms can resonate with faithful communities today that find themselves in complex and often confusing relationships with God. In the Symphony of Psalms, Stravinsky’s use of Scripture shapes the listener’s sense of the Psalter as a whole and can lead worshipers in an honest, bold alleluia.

Stravinsky and U2 Fix Psalm 40

This paper examines the reception of Psalm 40 by Igor Stravinsky in the second movement of his “Symphony of Psalms” and by U2 in their song “40,” the final track on their 1983 album War. Though both limit their reception to only the first three verses of the psalm, their appropriation of the text indicates two different interpretations of the psalm within the Canon. Stravinsky places the verses between the concluding verses of Psalm 39 and the entirety of Psalm 150, the result of which is a typical personal lament psalm made up of lament, petition, assurance, and praise—a very different structure than the canonical Psalm 40's assurance followed by lament. U2's appropriation, on the other hand, is arguably more faithful to the text of the canonical Psalm 40 in that its concluding lyrics hearken back to the harrowing opening track of their album, the “lament” “Sunday Bloody Sunday.” The paper concludes by arguing that both Stravinsky and U2 remain faithful to the spirit of the psalter as a whole by re-appropriating the words of the psalmist for each musician's own Sitz I’m Leben.

The Rake's Progress and Stravinsky's Return: The Composer's Evolving Approach to Setting Text

Stravinsky has a deserved reputation for manipulating the sound of words, which, among other factors, has given rise to accusations of “antihumanism” against the composer and his music. However, close analysis of the opera The Rake's Progress (1948–51) shows that Stravinsky actually takes care to set the text intelligibly, and at certain moments, even expressively. By analyzing metric displacement and motivic development as it evolved from the composer's earlier neoclassical settings—including Oedipus Rex (1927), the Symphony of Psalms (1930), and Perséphone (1934)—through his first efforts at serial composition in the Cantata (1952), this article contextualizes the seemingly anomalous expressiveness in The Rake's Progress. Discovery of this evolution in his approach to setting text also entails a reassessment of the composer's aesthetic concerns.

1930: Symphony of Psalms

We all know that the Symphony of Psalms was ‘composed for the glory of God and dedicated to the Boston Symphony Orchestra’, but we don't always notice that this wry equivocation is appropriate to a work whose theme is the relationship between Man and God. A comprehensive and suitably illustrated analysis of the work in those (or any other) terms would fill at least a booklet. Here we must confine ourselves to the exposition and a few representative developments of the Man/God ‘theme’.