Run Time: Approx. 16 minutes
In 1947, American soprano Eleanor Steber approached star American composer Samuel Barber about writing a movement for her to perform with orchestra. For the commission, Barber turned to a text by American Writer James Agee, that recalled a summer evening from his childhood. In the poem, which would later become the prologue to Agee’s “A Death in the Family,” a young boy lies in the grass of his front yard in his hometown of Knoxville, Tennessee. As twilight falls, he observes the world around him—the murmured conversations from porch rockers, the trees, the birds, the distant rumble of a streetcar. The memory is filled with contentment and childhood wonder, but also with sadness; Agee was recalling the last summer before his father died in a tragic car accident. Afterward, his family left Knoxville and never returned. It was a pivotal time in his life, and Knoxville became symbolic of the last of his childhood innocence before everything changed.
Barber felt a great connection to Agee’s text, saying, “I had always admired Mr. Agee’s writing, and this prose-poem particularly struck me because the summer evening he describes in his native southern town reminded me so much of similar evenings when I was a child at home. I found out, after setting this, that Mr. Agee and I are the same age, and the year he described was 1915, when we were both five. You see, it expresses a child’s feeling of loneliness, wonder, and the lack of identity in that marginal world between twilight and sleep.” Agee’s story may have resonated with Barber even more deeply at that time, as his own father was gravely ill. Barber would later dedicate the work to him.
Steber, too, felt the text reflected her childhood memories of growing up in Wheeling, West Virginia. Upon reading the poem, she declared, “That is exactly my childhood!” Perhaps audience members who grew up in Alabama may also find their own childhood memories bubbling to the surface.
Berber’s composition is a work of stunning, visceral nostalgia, and one would be hard pressed to find a more perfect fitting of music and text. Agee’s prose conjures a vivid snapshot of the American south in the early 20th-century. As the young boy sits in the grass, he muses “It has become the time of evening when people sit on their porches, rocking gently and talking gently.” Barber sets the scene with a meandering folk-inspired melody played by the winds. Long chords in the strings evoke the thick warmth of summer air, while plucked strings and harp gently rock along with the porch-sitters in a swaying rhythmic pulse.
As the evening unfolds, shifts in the musical themes mirror the wandering attention of the child as he observes the surrounding flora, fauna, and machinery. The text itself has a distinct musicality, with descriptions of “garden hoses singing like violins,” and a horse and buggy producing a “hollow iron music on the asphalt.” At one point the boy is startled by “A streetcar raising its iron moan,” and the music responds with a surge of agitation. But as twilight deepens into night, the music softens once again. The boy watches his father readying the house for sleep: “Now is the night one blue dew, my father has drained, now he has coiled the hose.”
Eventually, the boy lays down in the backyard with his father, mother, uncle, and aunt. At first, he’s excited, but as he begins to contemplate the vastness of the universe and his place in it, he begins to feel alone, desolate, and unsure of who he is. “And who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth, lying on quilts on the grass, in a summer evening, among the sounds of the night.” The feelings linger as he’s finally put to bed.