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Abraham and Isaac is a sacred ballad for baritone and orchestra composed in 1962–63 by Igor Stravinsky.
Contents
History
When the Israel Festival Committee asked Stravinsky for a new work, he decided to set the story of Abraham and Isaac to a text in Hebrew, a language with which he was not familiar. The philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin, who was a friend of the composer, helped Stravinsky to understand the sounds and structure of the text. Work was begun in 1962 and the score, which is dedicated to the people of the State of Israel, was completed on 3 March 1963. The work was premiered on 23 August 1964 in Binyanei Ha'Ooma, Jerusalem, by Ephraim Biran, baritone, and the Israel Festival Orchestra, conducted by Robert Craft (White 1979, 528).
Scoring
Abraham and Isaac is set for baritone solo and a chamber orchestra consisting of two flutes, alto flute, oboe, cor anglais, clarinet, bass clarinet, two bassoons, horn, two trumpets, tenor trombone, bass trombone, tuba, and string quintet.
Analysis
Although Stravinsky described the work as falling into five parts, played continuously but marked by changes of tempo, double bars divide the score into seven sections (White 1979, 530–31):
The work is based on a twelve-tone row, elaborated into hexachordal rotational arrays (Straus 2001, 106–109). Stravinsky often employs the columns from these arrays, which he called "verticals", to form canonic chordal successions (Straus 2001, 152–53, 158–59). The basic form of the row is
and is therefore interval class palindromic, with interval classes 1–2–2–1–4–2–4–1–2–2–1 (Smyth 1999, 134–35, 142).