11/20/2017 Songs (3), for voice & piano, Op.

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Genre Vocal Music

Samuel Barber
Classical
Songs (3), for voice & piano, Op. 45
Period Modern

Comp Date 1972

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Avg Duration 7:50 Description by Russell Platt [-]

Despite the great compositional technique Barber learned in his youth from dedicated study at the Curtis
Institute of Music, his muse was a sensitive one, keenly affected by the circumstances of his life. The last
fifteen years of Barbers life were not happy ones: his grand opera Anthony and Cleopatra had failed at
the Metropolitan Opera in 1966; he and his longtime companion Gian Carlo Menotti decided to sell their
Westchester, New York home "Capricorn," where they had lived for thirty years, with disastrous results
for Barber; he became increasingly dependent on alcohol; and he was diagnosed in 1978 with the
lymphatic cancer that would eventually kill him. The three songs of Op. 45 are wonderful things, but they
need to be heard with this background in mind. Barber's chosen texts reflect not only his increasing
mood of melancholia but, more importantly, his lifelong love affair with the English language. Only in the
Mlodies passagres (1950-51) did he actually set poems in a foreign tongue, but the texts for the Op.
45 reflect his deep absorption in European culture as a whole. Each is an exceptionally fluent English
translation of a Continental poem: James Joyce's "Now Have I Fed and Eaten Up the Rose" is based on
the 19th century German of Gottfried Keller; Czeslaw Milosz transforms the surreal Polish verse of Jerzy
Harasymowicz into "A Green Lowland of Pianos"; and Christopher Middleton's "O Boundless, Boundless
Evening" is an elegant rendering of a German poem by Georg Heym. The songs were composed on
commission from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and were premiered on April 29, 1974 by
baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and pianist Charles Wadsworth. Keller's original poem is part of a cycle
See Top Trending Food & Fun which concerns the disturbing prospect of a man buried alive; there is no terror in Barber's setting of this
Joycean extract, but the accompaniment features an obsessive use of a single falling figure that
JACKSONVILLE
suggests a protagonist with nowhere to go. The song is slow and doleful in an A minor key only
occasionally inflected with chromatic harmony; it rises to a weary climax, then falls away. The next two
songs also rely on repetitive piano figures independent of the vocal lines, which are always delivered with
a liquid resignation, mostly staying in the middle range: these are evidence not only of Barber's sureness
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of touch in matching tones to words, but perhaps also of a sense of creative exhaustion. But "Green

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11/20/2017 Songs (3), for voice & piano, Op. | Details | AllMusic
Lowland" is a gentle song full of funny surprises, and for the last one Barber writes one of his grandest
and most nostalgic tunes to match "the glow/Of long hills on the skyline," soon to fade. These are
landscape paintings as much as songs, made from an amalgam of straightforward, Anglo-Italian melody
00:00
and harmonies which tastefully evoke Scriabin and Liszt while maintaining a strong personality of their
own.

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Parts/Movements

1. Now have I fed and eaten up the rose

2. A Green Lowland of Pianos

3. O boundless, boundless evening

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Appears On
Complete

Year Title Label Catalog #

2017 Lineage Albany Records TROY 1679

Despite and Still: Melissa Fogarty sings Samuel

2011 Aureole 101
Barber

2010 Let Beauty Awake ATMA Classique 2615

Samuel Barber: String Quartet; Serenade; Dover EMI Classics /

2009 5099969523
Beach; Songs Warner Classics

Secrets of the Old: Complete Songs of Samuel Deutsche

2003 474685
Barber Grammophon

Secrets of the Old: Complete Songs of Samuel Deutsche

2002 4595062
Barber Grammophon

2001 Everything but the Hermit: Samuel Barber Songs Koch 7511

1995 Samuel Barber: Dover Beach Virgin 45033

Secrets of the Old: Complete Songs of Samuel Deutsche

1994 435867
Barber Grammophon

1991 Sharon Mabry Sings Vercoe, Goossen, Barber Owl Recording, Inc. 35

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