David Diamond belonged to a generation of great American symphonists who were pushed aside by the wave of serialism and atonality after World War II. In the 1930s and 40s, Serge Koussevitzky, music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, championed the works of these composers, which included the likes of Howard Hanson, Roy Harris, William Schuman, Walter Piston, Peter Mennin, and David Diamond. During his influential 25-year tenure with the BSO, Koussevitzky gave 146 world premieres and performances of over 300 works by American composers, favoring tonal and melodic music over anything too experimental.
Diamond was of a similar mind, saying, “It is my strong feeling that a romantically inspired contemporary music, tempered by reinvigorated classical technical formulas, is the way out of the present period of creativity chaos in music . . . To me, the romantic spirit in music is important because it is timeless.”
Diamond had been studying in Paris with Nadia Boulanger when war broke out in 1939. Upon his return to the United States, he struggled to find a teaching position. Amid geopolitical turmoil and personal financial hardship, Diamond nonetheless produced some of his finest works, including the Symphony No. 2 in 1943. At the encouragement of conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos, he sent the score to Koussevitzky. Diamond’s symphony immediately proved its worth, as the musicians of the BSO allegedly broke out into spontaneous applause after the first read-through. The BSO officially premiered the work the following year.
Conductor Gerard Schwartz, former music director of the Seattle Symphony while Diamond was composer-in-residence there, considers Diamond’s Symphony No. 2 the greatest American symphony of the 20th century. It is a substantial work, with two slow movements nearing a quarter hour each. Such expansiveness and emotional depth led Arnold Schoenberg to dub the composer “a young Bruckner.” Despite its obvious grounding in European symphonic tradition, the Second Symphony still conveys a natural Americanness. The wartime era is palpable in the symphony’s somber tone and dark hues, but the work manages to end on a life-affirming note.
The first movement, marked Adagio funèbre, is solemn and granitic. Open fifths rise over distant funereal drums, while an austere string melody becomes a weaving counterpoint, lending the movement a sense of continuous unfolding. A poignant oboe solo over trilling violas introduces the second theme before encroaching timpani, bass drums, and brass inject a flash of menace into the otherwise elegantly tragic movement.
The restless scherzo-like second movement is more sardonic than playful, somewhat suggestive of Shostakovich while showing Diamond at his most aggressively contrapuntal. Diamond creates thematic unity by borrowing a figure from the second theme of the Adagio. This figure, Diamond writes, is “mockingly turned back and forth between cellos and one bassoon.”
The contemplative Andante espressivo is one of Diamond’s most indelible inspirations, blending a characteristically rich vein of expansive lyricism with a searching elegiac quality and inner strength.
The solemnity is left behind in the confident energy of the spirited finale, the most explicitly “American”-sounding movement of the symphony. Episodes from previous movements are recalled without losing momentum, and there is a real sense of culmination and triumph over the preceding darkness en route to the blazingly brash coda.
-Katherine Buzard