Rouse: Symphony No. 6

To commemorate the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra’s 125th anniversary in 2020, the CSO commissioned Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Christopher Rouse to write a symphony that would mark an important moment in the Orchestra’s storied history, which includes historic American premieres of works by Claude Debussy, Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, Maurice Ravel, Béla Bartók, William Grant Still and commissions of many works that ultimately became mainstays of the classical repertoire, including Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man.

Rouse’s final work, Symphony No. was posthumously premiered in 2019 by the CSO conducted by Music Director Louis Langrée. Cast in four unbroken movements, Symphony No. 6 follows Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in its structure, by bookending the piece with two slower movements. The first movement, marked “Desolato,” opens with violins and fluegelhorn, the latter included “to imbue the opening movement with a feeling of yearning as it strives to find an anchor in a sea of doubt,” wrote Rouse. The two central movements, “Piacevole” and “Furioso” provide contrast to the first, serving as an interlude between the opening and closing movements of the symphony “neither working with or against the expressive grain of the opening Adagio,” wrote Rouse. The final movement, “Passacaglia,” returns to the somber mood of the first, concluding with a long droning E in the contrabasses and the soft sounds of the gong before going into breathtaking silence. Rouse wrote, “The drone is the lifeline. Fear and doubt give way to an uncertain serenity. Still the life drone sounds. Love adds its grace and its healing power. The drone continues. Gradually all begins to recede but for the drone. The drone holds and holds. At the end, the final step must be taken alone. The drone continues…and continues…until it stops.”