Music like Envoi

Envoi is a single-movement orchestral composition by the American composer Christopher Rouse. The work was commissioned by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra with additional contributions from Thurmond Smithgall. It was first performed May 9, 1996 in Atlanta Symphony Hall, Atlanta by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra under conductor Yoel Levi. The piece is dedicated to Rouse's mother, who died in the summer of 1993.

Envoi has a duration of approximately 20 minutes and is composed in a single adagio movement. Rouse described his inspiration for the work in the score program notes, writing:

Though long an admirer of Richard Strauss' music, I have always been more attracted to the twenty-five-year-old composer's program for Death and Transfiguration than to his actual musical realization of it. In the five years preceding the composition of Envoi, I lost a number of dear friends — Stephen Albert, William Schuman, Andrzej Panufnik, Aaron Copland, and Leonard Bernstein, for example — and they were memorialized in a variety of scores I composed between 1990 and 1995. A blow of a different sort occurred with the death of my mother in the summer of 1993, and to remember her I found myself returning to Strauss' program from a century before.