Samuel Barber

• Born: March 9, 1910, West Chester, Pennsylvania
• Died: January 23, 1981, New York City
  
  

Knoxville: Summer of 1915, Op. 24

• Composed: completed April 4, 1947 (revised 1949)
• Premiere: April 9, 1948 by soprano Eleanor Steber with Serge Koussevitsky conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra
• Instrumentation: soprano soloist, flute (incl. piccolo), oboe (incl. English horn), clarinet, bassoon, 2 horns, trumpet, triangle, harp, strings
• May Festival notable performances: This is the first performance of this work at the May Festival. First CSO: October 1950, Thor Johnson conducting, Eleanor Steber, soprano (Samuel Barber attended the Saturday concert). Most Recent CSO: September 2020, digital only concert, Louis Langrée conducting, Angel Blue, soprano.
• Duration: approx. 14 minutes

In the repertoire of songs for solo voice and orchestra, Samuel Barber’s setting of James Agee’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915 holds a particular distinction in America’s musical history. According to musicologist Barbara Heyman, the piece was the first of its kind to be commissioned by an American musician. Curiously, that credit was not part of its motivation—Barber had started planning a vocal-orchestral piece in conference with conductor Serge Koussevitsky prior to Knoxville’s official commissioning by soprano Eleanor Steber. With Steber as soloist, Koussevitsky premiered the work with the Boston Symphony Orchestra on April 9, 1948, and Steber went on to perform it around the country over the proceeding years, including with Thor Johnson’s Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra in October 1950. The piece’s well-earned status as an American music staple owes much to Steber as its first champion. After its earliest performances, Barber reduced the work to its familiar and now-standard chamber orchestra version.

The piece not only holds pride of place, but also competes for the distinction of most stirringly American in the vocal-orchestral repertoire. Yet, Barber was not bent on defining an iconic and identifiable “American” classical sound, either in terms of style or subject. Audiences typically hear that pursuit as more characteristic of Barber’s contemporary, Aaron Copland, who throughout his career carried the mantle of “Dean of American Composers.” Barber was rather more drawn to European culture, and his choices of poets for vocal music reflect as much, skewing strongly toward writers from the British Isles—he was inspired time and again by James Joyce, for instance. Nevertheless, Barber did look to American writers, setting texts by Agee, Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson, among others. And while musical Americanism was not of deep concern to Barber, he did dabble in the genre: A ragtime fugue concludes his Sonata for Piano; he prefaced his Excursions for piano by noting their basis in American vernacular music; and his diminutive opera, A Hand of Bridge, portrays middle class Americans at their titular pastime, set to pastiched jazz and popular music styles. Among these pursuits, biographers and critics have long pointed to Knoxville as Barber’s most genuine and convincing contribution to the catalogue of classical music’s American evocations, a view of which Barber was doubtless aware. Shortly before his death, while listening to a radio performance of Knoxville from his hospital bed, he commented with characteristic dry wit that he had managed to capture the American spirit almost as well as Copland. Barber may have been thinking of an Americanness that critic Allen Kozinn later ascribed to Knoxville’s “rocking chair rhythms” or what others have heard as a prairie-like open and transparent sound that evokes the music of Copland or Virgil Thomson.

Upon his first encounter with Agee’s text, Barber was struck both on artistic and personal levels, filled as it is with images that awaken the five senses to nostalgic reminiscence. Agee published the text in the August-September 1938 issue of Partisan Review with a mind toward an autobiographical novel, what became A Death in the Family, and, as such, it meditates on a safe time shortly before his father’s sudden and untimely death. Barber read sights and sounds from his own childhood in Agee’s references to an artist uncle and musician aunt (Barber’s close aunt Louise and uncle Sydney Homer were musicians) and, in Barber’s words, “parents sitting on the porch, talking quietly as they rocked” during the summer. Many have since identified with Barber’s piece in a similarly personal way, including Steber, soprano Leontyne Price, and choreographer Alvin Ailey, who all glimpsed in it their own childhoods. In 1947, as the composer worked on the piece, the specter of his aunt’s and father’s poor health loomed. Both passed away within the year, and Barber dedicated the piece to his father. The circumstances imbue the listening experience with tremendous emotional gravity. Barber’s uncharacteristic turn toward Americanism in Knoxville thus seems to come from a place of personal importance and sincerity, unbothered by a shirked responsibility to define a national sound.

Excerpting the last third of Agee’s text, Barber introduces us to his Knoxville as a scene already in progress, indeed, in the middle of a sentence. The choice may invoke the ephemerality of nostalgic memory. A plaintive pastoral orchestral introduction sets the piece in motion and leads to the vocal soloist’s speech-like opening lines (“It has become that time of evening…”), supported by Kozinn’s “rocking chair rhythms.” The combination of music and ruminating images of bygone eras here evinces the staid restraint of a lullaby suppressing modern life’s disturbances. The textual and musical mood returns twice through the piece as a kind of refrain. But the oasis does not last. A jarring change of pace activated by rudely interrupting woodwind chirps brings in the contrasting next section, which frets over the previously suppressed signs—and now sounds—of modernity: a streetcar’s “iron whine and rising speed.” The lilting refrain section returns again to familial images of evening and nature (“Parents on porches…”). A mysterious-sounding string melody leads to an adoring litany of the family’s members, prelude to a more sustained yet fraught prayer for religious benevolence for the family. The piece closes with a final airing of the lullaby refrain (“After a little I am taken in and put to bed.”), sealing the envelope on this letter from the past.

—Dr. Jacques Dupuis