Igor Stravinsky's 'The Flood' represents one of the most intellectually ambitious attempts to bring the Genesis creation and flood narratives to twentieth-century audiences, and one of the most instructive failures in the history of sacred music. Commissioned by CBS Television and broadcast in June 1962, the work drew on resources spanning three millennia - Genesis 1-9, the Chester Mystery Plays, the Book of Job - and fused them into a theatrical form that combined Stravinsky's late serialist idiom with spoken narration, mime, and choreography. It was poorly received by critics and audiences alike. Yet its failure illuminates the deep questions it was raising.
The work begins not with Genesis but with Job 38:4 - 'Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation? Tell me, if you understand.' This opening from the divine speeches in the whirlwind establishes the theological framework for everything that follows: the creation account is not a story about human origins but about divine sovereignty. God speaks to Job from the place of ultimate authority over the natural order, and Job's proper response is silence before overwhelming mystery. Stravinsky places this challenge at the beginning of his work, before the first note of creation music, as a way of ensuring that the creation narrative is heard as theology rather than mythology.
Genesis 1:1-2:3 is then set as a sequence of musical tableaux, each corresponding to a day of creation. Stravinsky's approach was neither naive literalism nor embarrassed allegory: he treated the creation account as a liturgical text with its own rhythm and cadence, shaped by centuries of Jewish and Christian reading and singing. The repeated refrain 'And there was evening, and there was morning' - the biblical formula that marks each creative day - becomes a structural principle for the music, giving the work a disciplined shape that mirrors the text's own ordered progress.
Genesis 6:14 - 'So make yourself an ark of cypress wood; make rooms in it and coat it with pitch inside and out' - begins the flood narrative. Stravinsky set the building of the ark and the gathering of the animals with a certain sardonic humor drawn from the Chester Mystery Plays, medieval dramatic texts that had depicted Noah's wife as reluctant to board the ark and Noah's neighbors as mockingly skeptical. This medieval precedent gave Stravinsky permission to treat the narrative with dramatic complexity: the flood story is not merely an allegory of salvation but a story about human stubbornness in the face of divine command.
The use of the Chester Mystery Plays is the work's most creative structural decision. The Plays represent the continuous tradition of biblical drama in English culture from the medieval period to the present - the tradition that connects the Book of Genesis to Shakespeare's histories to the Victorian sacred oratorio and beyond. By incorporating medieval text alongside Stravinsky's serialist score, 'The Flood' was making an argument about the continuity of this tradition: that each generation must retell the foundational stories in its own artistic language, however experimental that language might be.
The television premiere was catastrophic. CBS ran it without adequate promotion, audience expectations were unprepared for Stravinsky's complex idiom, and critical reception was largely dismissive. Stravinsky himself was deeply wounded. Yet subsequent staged productions have revealed the work's genuine theatrical power when properly presented. Its failure was contextual, not inherent: it was the wrong work in the wrong medium for the wrong audience at the wrong moment. Its qualities - the boldness of the conception, the intellectual seriousness of the biblical engagement, the ambition to bring serialist music and sacred drama into productive dialogue - are considerable.