Samuel Barber was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania, a town on the outskirts of Philadelphia, on March 9, 1910. He was the son of Samuel Le Roy Barber and Marguerite Beatty. 11 Barber recorded Dover Beach on Victor records, which was deleted from the catiflue some years ago and is now a collectors' item. 12 Broder, gg.
Hermit Songs is a cycle of ten songs for voice and piano by Samuel Barber. Written in 1953 on a grant from the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation, it takes as its basis a collection of anonymous poems written by Irishmonks and scholars from the 8th to the 13th centuries, in translations by W. H. Auden, Chester Kallman, Howard Mumford Jones, Kenneth H. Jackson and Seán Ó Faoláin. The Hermit Songs received their premiere in 1953 at the Library of Congress, with soprano Leontyne Price and Barber himself as pianist.[1]
The ten songs of the cycle and the respective translators of each poem are as follows:
- 'At St Patrick’s Purgatory' (translated by Seán Ó Faoláin)
- 'Church Bell at Night' (translated by Howard Mumford Jones)
- 'St Ita’s Vision' (translated by Chester Kallman)
- 'The Heavenly Banquet' (translated by Seán Ó Faoláin)
- 'The Crucifixion' (translated by Howard Mumford Jones)
- 'Sea Snatch' (translated by Kenneth H. Jackson)
- 'Promiscuity' (translated by Kenneth H. Jackson)
- 'The Monk and his Cat' (translated by W.H. Auden)
- 'The Praises of God' (translated by W.H. Auden)
- 'The Desire for Hermitage' (translated by Seán Ó Faoláin)
'The Heavenly Banquet' text is attributed to St. Brigid according to Samuel Barber's score, who shares the patronage of Ireland with St. Patrick. She is known to practicing Catholics also as the patron saint of beer.
'[These songs] are small poems, thoughts or observations, some very short, and speak in straightforward, witty, and often surprisingly modern terms of the simple life they led - close to nature, their animals and to God. Some are literal translations and others, were translated (where existing translations seemed inadequate.) Robin Flower has written in The Irish Tradition: “It was not only that these scribes and anchorites lived by the destiny of their dedication in an environment of wood and sea; it was because they brought into that environment an eye washed miraculously clear by a continual spiritual exercise that they had that strange vision of natural things in an almost unnatural purity.”
See also[edit]
Masterworks Portrait, Samuel Barber: Knoxville: Summer of 1915; Dover Beach; Hermit Songs; Andromache's Farewell. Various artists.
References[edit]
- ^Allen, William Duncan (Autumn 1973). 'Musings of a Music Columnist'. The Black Perspective in Music. 1 (2): 107–114. doi:10.2307/1214445. JSTOR1214445.
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Despite the great compositional technique Barber learned in his youth from dedicated study at the Curtis Institute of Music, his muse was a sensitive one, keenly affected by the circumstances of his life. The last fifteen years of Barber¹s life were not happy ones: his grand opera Anthony and Cleopatra had failed at the Metropolitan Opera in 1966; he and his longtime companion Gian Carlo Menotti decided to sell their Westchester, New York home 'Capricorn,' where they had lived for thirty years, with disastrous results for Barber; he became increasingly dependent on alcohol; and he was diagnosed in 1978 with the lymphatic cancer that would eventually kill him. The three songs of Op. 45 are wonderful things, but they need to be heard with this background in mind. Barber's chosen texts reflect not only his increasing mood of melancholia but, more importantly, his lifelong love affair with the English language. Only in the Mélodies passagères (1950-51) did he actually set poems in a foreign tongue, but the texts for the Op. 45 reflect his deep absorption in European culture as a whole. Each is an exceptionally fluent English translation of a Continental poem: James Joyce's 'Now Have I Fed and Eaten Up the Rose' is based on the 19th century German of Gottfried Keller; Czeslaw Milosz transforms the surreal Polish verse of Jerzy Harasymowicz into 'A Green Lowland of Pianos'; and Christopher Middleton's 'O Boundless, Boundless Evening' is an elegant rendering of a German poem by Georg Heym. The songs were composed on commission from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and were premiered on April 29, 1974 by baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and pianist Charles Wadsworth. Keller's original poem is part of a cycle which concerns the disturbing prospect of a man buried alive; there is no terror in Barber's setting of this Joycean extract, but the accompaniment features an obsessive use of a single falling figure that suggests a protagonist with nowhere to go. The song is slow and doleful in an A minor key only occasionally inflected with chromatic harmony; it rises to a weary climax, then falls away. The next two songs also rely on repetitive piano figures independent of the vocal lines, which are always delivered with a liquid resignation, mostly staying in the middle range: these are evidence not only of Barber's sureness of touch in matching tones to words, but perhaps also of a sense of creative exhaustion. But 'Green Lowland' is a gentle song full of funny surprises, and for the last one Barber writes one of his grandest and most nostalgic tunes to match 'the glow/Of long hills on the skyline,' soon to fade. These are landscape paintings as much as songs, made from an amalgam of straightforward, Anglo-Italian melody and harmonies which tastefully evoke Scriabin and Liszt while maintaining a strong personality of their own.
Parts/Movements
- Now have I fed and eaten up the rose
- A Green Lowland of Pianos
- O boundless, boundless evening
![Samuel Samuel](/uploads/1/2/6/3/126361413/499561184.png)
Appears On
Year | Title / Performer | Label / Catalog # | AllMusic Rating |
---|---|---|---|
2018 | AVI 8553402 | ||
2017 | Randall Scarlata / Laurie Ward | TROY 1679 | |
2011 | Aureole | ||
2010 | Joshua Hopkins / Jerad Mosbey | 2615 | |
2009 | Thomas Allen / Endellion String Quartet / Roger Vignoles | 5099969523 | |
2003 | Deutsche Grammophon | ||
2002 | Deutsche Grammophon | ||
2001 | 7511 | ||
1995 | Thomas Allen / Endellion String Quartet / Roger Vignoles | 45033 | |
1994 | Deutsche Grammophon | ||
1991 | 35 |