Reconsidering Stravinsky in Exile: The Tangled Taxonomy of His World War II "Victory" Symphony

ABSTRACT: In his polemics, composer Igor Stravinsky in exile insisted on the liberating autonomy of the creative act. But the tangled history of his Symphony in Three Movements, commissioned by the New York Philharmonic as a "victory symphony" in 1945, suggests a composition process that was less than fluent. This "symphony" complexly monograms its composer's layered identity, disclosing a condition of exile equally challenged and resourceful. Had Stravinsky less cause for resilience—had there been no Bolshevik Revolution, no world upheaval—he might have left a musical legacy less intriguingly textured with self-denial and reinvention, less mediated by rationalization, more sustained in the elemental energies powering his initial creative surge.