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A Sermon, a Narrative and a Prayer


A Sermon, a Narrative and a Prayer is a cantata for alto and tenor singers, a narrator, chorus, and orchestra by Igor Stravinsky, composed in 1960–61. It belongs to the composer’s serial period, and lasts a little over a quarter of an hour in performance.

Stravinsky began work on A Sermon, a Narrative and a Prayer in Hollywood in 1960, and finished it on 31 January 1961. The score is dedicated to the Swiss conductor Paul Sacher, who commissioned it—the third movement bears an additional dedication: "In memoriam the Reverend James McLane (†1960)". It was published later in the same year, and the work's first performance was given by the Basler Kammerorchester, conducted by the dedicatee, on 23 February 1962 in Basel (White 1979, 510).

According to a note sent by the composer to Paul Sacher on 7 August 1961, Stravinsky regarded this cantata as a New-Testament counterpart to Threni, composed three years earlier to an Old-Testament text, the Lamentations of Jeremiah. For his text, Stravinsky chose passages from the Pauline epistles and the Acts of the Apostles, as well as a prayer by the Elizabethan poet Thomas Dekker, written in a style of English contemporary with that of the translations from the King James Version used for the Biblical passages (White 1979, 510). The full titles of the cantata’s three movements are:

The full orchestra never sounds together anywhere in the work, and the chorus is silent throughout the second movement (Mason 1961, 5).

The opening Sermon is divided into eight sections, in an A B C D A E C D pattern (Mason 1961, 6). The basic series used in the work is presented melodically in section A, an instrumental prelude opening the first movement: E–E–C–D–D–B–B–F–G–A–A–F The first five notes of this row are a permuted form of the five-note row Stravinsky used for In Memoriam Dylan Thomas—a chromatic pentachord consisting of the notes bounded by a major third, and this pentachord occurs twice more in the row in the overlapping segment of notes 3–7, and in notes 8–12 (Mason 1961, 6; Van den Toorn 1983, 435; White 1979, 510–11.


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