Samuel Barber – Knoxville, Summer of 1915 (1947)

It’s amazing how much a performer can change a piece.  Different performances don’t just bring out different elements of a piece;  they can actually change what the piece seems to be.  Case in point:  I just listened to two different recordings of Knoxville, Summer of 1915, one sung by Carmen Pelton and one sung by Kathleen Battle.  After hearing the first one, I was all set to write something about how little sense 20th-century “art song” makes to me, how almost every composer after Schoenberg and Debussy seems to have an emotionally simplistic and one-dimensional conception of text-setting.  Then I listened to someone who can make those high G#s, As and Bbs sound lyrical and effortless, and suddenly the whole piece made more sense.  The main problem I have with 20th-century text-setting is the tendency of many composers to go into histrionics at the drop of a hat, to write as if something can only be moving if it’s amped up and exaggerated — and if the singer can’t deliver high notes without belting, that’s going to make the problem a whole lot worse.

That said, I still think what Barber did with James Agee’s text robs it of a lot of its power.  I haven’t read the entire short story, but I did read the excerpts printed at the beginning of the score before listening, and what I see is a scene in suspended animation, filtered through the uncomprehending eyes of a child and the dreamlike haze of adult nostalgia.  Everything is equalized — just look at the line “people go by; things go by,” which explicitly makes people and things equivalent and parallel.  Barber gets the mood exactly right at the beginning of the piece:  a sort of barcarolle, played by low flute, clarinet, harp and pizzicato strings, tonal but slightly dissonant, quiet and dreamy and wistful.  But later, when he gets to a passage describing a streetcar, he goes for literalism, representing the “iron moan” of the wheels with a shift to a faster tempo and a more chromatic language.  On the word “stertorous,” he even employs that ultimate modern-art-song cliché:  the big leap up followed by a falling third.  OK, maybe it wasn’t a cliché in 1947, but it’s still too obvious.  Look at the text again:  the streetcar is just another thing “going by,” a sound growing fainter and fainter until “the night [is] one blue dew.”  Writing fast, dramatic music here is all wrong;  it makes sense on the sentence level but not on the paragraph level.

I have the same problem with Barber’s setting of the line “By some chance, here they are, all on this earth; 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.”  He goes for swelling strings, ominous phrygian inflections, and a climax, right on the first syllable of the word “sorrow,” on a high Bb — the highest note of the piece, if I’m not mistaken.  Yes, that does make sense as a representation of sorrow — but it’s the furious, violent sorrow of someone who just saw someone they love get murdered, not the lonely, confused sorrow of a child who doesn’t understand his role in the world (see the epigram and last line of the text), or the bittersweet sorrow of an adult thinking back on simpler times.  So maybe the performer doesn’t make that much of a difference after all;  Battle’s version certainly made more emotional sense to me than Pelton’s, but she wasn’t able to fix what seem to me to be basic flaws in the piece’s conception.

One final note:  I’m intrigued by the variety of harmonic languages at play here:  Mahlerian tonality, neo-classical diatonic dissonance, almost Pärt-like modality in the opening passage, Bartókian chromaticism before the passage that starts “On the rough wet grass,” and so on.  Also, is it just me or do John Adams’s pitch choices have a lot of Barber in them?  Is this piece even typical of Barber?  The only other thing I know by him is the Adagio for Strings (1938).