On 18 January 1962, the celebrity couple Igor and Vera Stravinsky were invited by US President John F Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy to a gala dinner at the White House. Less than two years later, Kennedy had been assassinated. Stravinsky wrote this brief elegy for baritone and three clarinets to specially commissioned lyrics from W H Auden: five short verses, each a 17-syllable haiku. Its serial construction gives the music a stark intensity. The three clarinets seem to act almost like a Greek chorus.  Anticipating "the albatross of 'epic' poetry and symphonic sentiment that the event [would] surely give rise to and for a certain time excuse," Stravinsky obtained from Auden a "very quiet little lyric" with which to commemorate the assassination.

Nicolas Nabokov was born in 1903 to a distinguished family of landed gentry (Vladimir Nabokov was his first cousin).  With the eruption of revolution, the Nabokovs fled to the Crimea and Nabokov later lived in Germany and France before relocating to the United States in 1933. Writing for Partisan Review and for Dwight Macdonald’s Politics, he consolidated a reputation as an authority on Soviet culture within the anticommunist left. In 1951, he was named General Secretary of the new Congress for Cultural Freedom. All of this submerged his continued vocation as a composer. Two big operas — Rasputin’s End (1958) and Love’s Labour’s Lost (1971) — led nowhere. More noticed were his ballet-oratorio Ode (1928), premiered by Serge Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes; Union Pacific (1934), an “American ballet” for Colonel W. de Basil’s Ballet Russes; and Don Quixote (1966), for which George Balanchine famously returned to the stage to dance the title role opposite his muse Suzanne Farrell. While these works do not evince a highly personal style, their aesthetic direction is neoclassical — and Stravinsky, the king of musical neoclassicism, became Nabokov’s signature musical ally. In articles and books, Nabokov celebrated Stravinsky as the “discoverer” of new domains of rhythm, instrumentation, and harmony; his concert and stage works, perpetually evolving, signified “a necessary and sound development” in the dynamic evolution of 20th-century modernism, “overleaping” the 12-tone rigors of Arnold Schoenberg and his acolytes. Stravinsky in turn acclaimed Nabokov the “cultural generalissimo” of the non-communist West.