Performed even more often than the composer's repertoire mainstay Appalachian Spring, Copland's A Lincoln Portrait has achieved the status of a legitimate American classic. The restraint and nobility of Copland's score and the inclusion of Abraham Lincoln's own words (including extracts from the Gettysburg Address) lends A Lincoln Portrait a dignity and sincere, non-jingoistic spirit rare in other "patriotic" music of the World War II era.

In 1942, conductor André Kostelanetz commissioned Copland, along with a number of other well-known composers, to provide a musical portrait of a famous American. After considering and then rejecting Walt Whitman as a subject—one of the other commissioned composers (Jerome Kern) had already chosen a literary figure, Mark Twain)—Copland decided upon Lincoln. Copland's friend and fellow composer Virgil Thomson pointed out the problems of adequately representing the greatness of a man such as Lincoln solely in music. The solution he suggested was to bring Lincoln into the music by writing the work for speaker and orchestra, the speaker declaiming Lincoln's own words. Copland embraced such a plan, producing one of the more successful examples of a concert work that incorporates narration. The role of speaker in major performances and recordings of A Lincoln Portrait has in fact been filled by luminaries from many fields of endeavor, ranging from Marian Anderson to Henry Fonda to Eleanor Roosevelt to Norman Schwarzkopf to Copland himself.

Listeners may find much of the text unfamiliar, since Copland drew his source material largely from lesser-known passages in Lincoln's writings and speeches. Copland reserves the famous phrase from the Gettysburg Address—"government of the people, by the people, and for the people"—for the work's climactic ending, maximizing the impact of the words.

In his program notes, Copland explains that A Lincoln Portrait is divided into three main parts. The first part is a portrayal of Lincoln, "the mysterious sense of fatality that surrounds Lincoln's personality, and near the end of the first section, something of his gentleness and simplicity of spirit." Allusions to the folk song "Springfield Mountain" (including a trumpet solo at the end of this section) aptly echo this characterization. The central section is a sprightly Allegro that evokes the times in which Lincoln lived: sleigh bells recall horse-drawn, nineteenth century transportation, while fragments of Stephen Foster's "Camptown Races" weave in and out of the texture. In the final section, the speaker assumes the voice of Lincoln himself. The words are for the most part set against a quiet, unobtrusive orchestral backdrop, with occasional, more prominent punctuations and responses from the ensemble. The work climaxes with a quotation from the Gettysburg Address, accompanied by a return of the the solo trumpet melody from the opening section. A powerful C major chord brings the work to a sonorous close.

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