The first movement, in traditional sonata form, is Stravinsky's longest in a single meter since 1906. But the rhythmic tensions of the piece are one of its wonders. The accented off-beats continue to surprise us no matter how well we know the music. Rests are also surprisingly extended. The rhythmic vocabulary—eighths and quarters mainly, a few half notes, sixteenths as connecting lines and part of an accompaniment figure—are almost as restricted as in the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Having mentioned that capolavoro, the increased use of the dotted figure in the latter part of the movement, and of the dotted-quarter rest, building to the climax, is remarkably Beethovenian. The thematic material is restricted as well, and is as devoid of chromatics as any music of its time. The modulations, with one exception, do not wander to remote keys, but favour the subdominant and dominant, and the excursions through F minor, E, D, E flat minor are brief. The movement's most striking episode is the ending. Flute and clarinet, two octaves apart, play the first theme legato, over a staccato ostinato figure in violas and second violins that continues unchanged until the final chords. The melody does change, if only by a single upper note involving an octave leap that brings new brightness. Stravinsky seems to be saying that great music can still be composed with the simplest means.

Stravinsky's elder daughter died of tuberculosis at the end of November 1938. His wife, Catherine, died from the same disease on 2 March 1939. He did not complete the first movement until 17 April 1939, by which time he was stricken with tuberculosis himself and confined to the same sanatorium, Sancellemoz, in the Haute-Savoie, where his wife and daughters had spent so much of their lives. The second movement, Larghetto, was begun there on 27 April. It employs a reduced orchestra, omitting the tuba, trombones, timpani, two of the horns, and one of the trumpets. His sketchbook shows that he wrote most of the movement in quartet-score form. The full draft was finished on 19 July, after very little trial-and-error sketching. The music is elegiac, with long-line, elegantly embellished melodies. The duets between the oboe and violins are graceful and refined beyond any of music of the twentieth century known to this writer, and even the agitato middle section is soft and subdued.

The manuscript score of the second movement survived a perilous wartime adventure. Willy Strecker, the Symphony's publisher, visited the composer twice in Sancellemoz, to bring each of the first two movements safely back to Schott, Mainz for engraving. On the first visit Stravinsky gave the manuscript of the first movement to him, and tried (unsuccessfully) to establish a connection for future transactions through Luxembourg, Stravinsky being a banned composer in the Third Reich, and Strecker being forbidden to send proofs (and royalties) to him in France. On the second visit, only ten days before the beginning of World War II, Stravinsky parted with the score of the second movement in the same way. (The last two movements were printed in New York during World War II.) When Schott had engraved the second movement, Strecker entrusted the manuscript to the wife of Paul Hindemith to return it to Stravinsky in New York, where she was hoping to rejoin her husband. Somehow, she managed to obtain passage through Italy in 1942 and reach the United States, but the score was not restored to Stravinsky until 1 January 1953. On this date Hindemith directed a matinée concert of his music in Town Hall, to which Stravinsky, "self-confined" to bed with a cold (in order the escape the concert), had sent me as deputy. After it, Hindemith came to visit Stravinsky in his hotel (the Gladstone, on East 52nd Street) and at the end of a vivacious meeting withdrew the manuscript from a valise and presented it to its composer. Though Stravinsky had long since forgotten about the manuscript, he was pleased to see it again, and to my amazement and overwhelming thrill he inscribed it to me as a New Year's gift.

The third movement was composed in Cambridge and completed in Boston on 27 April. The fourth is dated Hollywood, 17 August. The composer conducted the première with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on 7 November 1940.

Writer: Robert Craft