From the time of his student days until his death in 1981, Samuel Barber has stood in the first echelon of outstanding American composers. While not exactly a household word, his reputation as a composer of elegant, finely-crafted art is stellar. Notwithstanding the adulation of Aaron Copland’s populist music from the 1930s and 40s, most of the latter composer’s compositions in other musical styles are not well received by the American public–too dissonant and modern! On the other hand, no major American composer of the twentieth century was a more ardent and eloquent champion of a lyrical, accessible, yet modern idiom than Samuel Barber. His musical style is founded in the romantic traditions of the nineteenth century, whose harmonic language and formal structures were his point of departure. Unlike so many of his peers, he was not powerfully swayed by the modernism emanating from Europe after World War I, but pursued his own path.
Consistently lyrical throughout his career, it is telling that his songs constitute about two-thirds of his compositions in number. His vocal works include two major operas, Vanessa (1956), and Antony and Cleopatra (1966), the latter composed for the opening of the Metropolitan Opera House in Lincoln Center. He composed at least one work for almost every musical genre, and unlike most composers, he was a recognized and published composer from his student days
Knoxville: Summer of 1915 was composed in 1947, and given its première by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Like the best of vocal music, its success and reputation rests equally with the quality of the corresponding text. In this case, Barber chose selections from the prose poem by James Agee of that title that was first published in The Partisan Review in 1939. His poem has been called “arguable the most beautiful prose poem in English.” Agee’s heart-tugging evocation of simple childhood memories in the South, directly expressed through the gauzy mists of time, is irresistible to almost any reflective adult. It must be said that in this case, as in a great Schubert song, text and music here have met perfect artistic partners. Barber’s sensitive, lush music aptly matches the equally lyrical words of Agee in a rhapsodic melding of imagery and sound.
The overall shape and form of the music, while following clear, a contrasting succession of ideas, is not so important as the palpable nuances of mood, tone, and imagery of the text. The light orchestration gives full opportunities to the colors of the woodwinds, horn, and harp in partnership with the discreet string section. When Agee wrote the poem, he was remembering the time just before his father was killed in an accident. When Barber set it, his own father was dying. So, there is a clear congruence in the context of both men’s frame of mind. While there are some obvious examples of Barber’s word painting in the music to reflect the exact text of the moment—as in the section setting the streetcar reference—the overall tone and atmosphere is the key. There’s no cartoonish “Mickey Mousing” of every word/music coincidence. Barber wisely varied the tempos and moods to suit Agee’s text, and that generates the form and the agreeable variety of the work. And of course, he built it around unifying ideas and motives, but that’s not the point of it all. Rather, it is the continuing weft of expressive, lightly-scored musical reflections of the implications in this magical, haunting memoir of childhood—and our universal resonance with it.
–Wm. E. Runyan
© 2025 William E. Runyan