It has been called "austere"[2] but also a "culminating point" in his career, "important both spiritually and stylistically" and "the most ambitious and structurally the most complex" of all his religious compositions,[3] and even "among Stravinsky's greatest works".

As Threni was intended for concert rather than liturgical use, Stravinsky chose the text freely from the early chapters of the Book of Lamentations.

He considered it less likely that works by Renaissance composers, including Tallis, Byrd and Palestrina, had influenced him, although he had studied such music.

Stravinsky composed Threni between the summer of 1957 and the spring of 1958,[1] beginning it on 29 August 1957 at the piano of the nightclub in the hotel where he was staying in Venice,[5] and completing it before 27 March 1958.

Stravinsky nevertheless had a share in the blame for not canceling the concert despite the pleas of family and friends, including his wife and Nadia Boulanger.

[11] Conceding that the performance was a "catastrophe", Boulez nevertheless insisted that he had in fact participated in the piano rehearsals, together with Stravinsky, whom he had tried in vain to persuade to be firmer with the singers.

While agreeing that the singers were "absolutely awful", Boulez protested they had been chosen not by himself, but by an agent in charge of the Aix-en-Provence festival.

Stravinsky wrote Threni for the Venice Biennale, not for liturgical use, and he chose the words himself to suit his musical purposes.

[8] Stravinsky called his treatment of pitch in Threni "a kind of 'triadic atonality'", contrasting this with his ballet scores' "tonality repetition".

[8][17] But he does not really use twelve-tone technique in depth, relying on free transposition and combination, selection, and repetition, and the music's character is not very different from that of his earlier works: the beginning of "Sensus spei", for example (especially the many repeated notes in the alto solo, and the repeated response from the chorus), recalls Renard and Les noces, and the two short passages for strings and chorus near the beginning setting the Hebrew letters caph and res are reminiscent of places in Orpheus (1948).

[17] But Stravinsky, while acknowledging that he had studied Tallis's setting and works by William Byrd and Palestrina, did not believe that they had influenced his piece.

[15] Other resemblances have been observed – for example, the male-quartet episode in the "Querimonia" was probably suggested by Carlo Gesualdo's Aestimus sum – though such things may be better characterized as "identifications" than "influences".

[19] The passage beginning at bars 231 ("NUN: Scrutemur vias nostras") presents a rhythmic texture new to Stravinsky, which strongly resembles the multilayered rhythms of Stockhausen's Zeitmaße, which Craft was rehearsing in Stravinsky's home at the time of composition (16 January to 14 February 1958).

It begins with the words "Oratio Jeremiae Prophetae" ("prayer of the prophet Jeremiah"), after which the music sets Lamentations chapter 5, verses 1, 19 and 21.