FOUR AUDIO PIECES - ALL MUSIC Samuel Barber was born in West Chester, PA on March 9, 1910. He died in New York on January 23, 1981. Barber's works include the famous Adagio for Strings, the operas, Vanessa and Antony and Cleopatra, the Essays for Orchestra, Medea's Dance of Vengeance, and over 100 songs. The concert aria for soprano and orchestra, Knoxville: Summer of 1915 was written in 1947. Samuel Barber loved literature. His songs texts called upon poetry by James Stephens, Gerard Manley Hopkins, John Donne, and medieval Irish mystics as interpreted by Sean O'Faolain in Hermit Songs. It was conductor Serge Koussevitzky who initially asked Barber for a concert work for soprano and orchestra, to be performed by the Boston Symphony with a soloist to be mutually decided upon in 1948. Koussevitzky, a cultured man whose English remained fractured after 25 years in Boston, left the choice of text to the composer. Barber had been taken by a prose poem by James Agee (1909-1955) called Knoxville: Summer of 1915, that later became the prologue to Agee's great novel, A Death in the Family. Agee begins:
We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennessee in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child. It was a little bit mixed sort of block, fairly solidly lower middle class, with one or two juts apiece on either side of that. The houses corresponded: middle-sized gracefully fretted wood houses built in the late nineties and early nineteen hundreds, with small front and side and more spacious backyards, and trees in the yards.
In 1947 the one American born soprano whose voice and musicianship toward over everyone else was Eleanor Steber (1916-1990 ). Steber was a sexy, earthy soprano who liked a highball and whose musicianship was acknowledged as second to none. She was known for a bawdy personality and an exquisite voice, and she was a looker, making her ever more popular on the "Community Concerts" Circuit, not to mention at the Metropolitan Opera, where she sang leading roles for twenty years. Steber accepted the invitation from Koussevitzky to premier Barber's new work, and for ten years her luscious soprano voice owned this music. Barber's biographer Barbara Heyman writes, "(Barber) was drawn to Knoxville: Summer of 1915, a reflection of the poet James Agee because for him it vividly evoked his own childhood; it is the most specifically "American" of all his works. 'That was exactly my childhood in Wheeling, West Virginia!' recalled Eleanor Steber" Here's Eleanor Steber's recording of Knoxville: Summer of 1915 with the Dumbarton Oaks Orchestra conducted by William Strickland Part 1: [audio:steber-pt-1.mp3] Part 2: [audio:steber-pt-2.mp3] Eleanor Steber's successor as America''s greatest soprano was Leontyne Price (b. 1927). Price had already served as Barber's muse for the Hermit Songs (more on them anon). It was for Leontyne Price and the Metropolitan Opera that Barber wrote Antony and Cleopatra in 1966 (more on that anon). It was for Leontyne Price that Barber wrote his final song cycle, Despite and Still (go look it up yourself). Of Knoxville, Leontyne Price said, "As a southerner, it expresses everything I know about my roots and my mama and father...my home town...You can smell the South in it..." Here she is in an excerpt from Knoxville, recorded in 1968. The New Philharmonia Orchestra is conducted by Thomas Schippers, another Barber protege. All of my people are bodies larger than mine...with voices gentle and meaningless like the voices of sleeping birds. One is an artist, he is living at home. One is a musician, she is living at home. One is my mother is good to me. One is my father who is good to me.... [audio:price.mp3] And so to the end of this childlike, sweet reverie of an innocent time, when childhood meant safety, plates of ice cream on a hot summer night "...that time of evening when people sit on their porches..." After a little while I am taken in and put to bed. Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her: and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home: but will not, oh will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am Here are the last few moments of Knoxville, sung by Mansfield, Ohio's own Sylvia McNair, with the Atlanta Symphony conducted by Yoel Levi [audio:mcnair.mp3] Steber, Prce and McNair, three-almost-generations of superb American artists loved Saul Barber's "most specifically American" work.
