Symphony No. 15 'Lincoln' (2025)

Symphony No.15 “Lincoln” was composed between 2021-2023. It is an eight-movement work for baritone and orchestra which is, in a way, a portrait of Lincoln as the image of a man who has stayed in my consciousness these many years.

Lincoln had made his way into other works of mine. This began in the early 1980s with the Civil Wars, a collaboration with Robert Wilson. Lincoln next appeared in The Perfect American (2013) about the death of Walt Disney in which Disney interacts with an animatronic Lincoln in The Hall of Presidents. Lincoln again appears in Appomattox (2015), an opera about the legacy of race in America.  

Opera is a species of theater, not a place for a history lesson. When writing a symphony, we are talking about a relationship made even more abstract. Unlike some of my operas centered on figures such as Gandhi, Akhnaten, and scientists like Einstein, Kepler, and Galileo, when I was invited to compose a new piece, a symphony, I thought of presenting an image of Lincoln and his legacy as it appeared to me.

The figure of Lincoln, this self-taught man who seemingly came out of nowhere, who spoke in a very poetic style, and whose legacy of holding the country together in a period during which it was ripping itself apart - seemed an appropriate subject to consider on this, our country’s 250th birthday. 

- Philip Glass