Barber, Knoxville: Summer of 1915
Summer may not start officially until June 21, but I grew up with the firm understanding that summer meant summer vacation, which commenced at the beginning of June. And I grew up in Houston where, if one looks only at the thermometer, summer starts sometime in March. This year, school got out in March. So, by my lights, school’s out, June is here, it’s hot . . . it’s summer.
And this summer does not promise to be one of quiet relaxation. Carol had a few things to say about that yesterday.
Since I had this work in the cue to be featured sometime soon, I decided to bump it up to today. It seems timely—partly because it’s summer and because of current events, but more as something that calls us to better times.
The writer James Agee was born in Knoxville in 1909. His childhood home in Knoxville no longer stands, but James Agee Park (on what is now James Agee Street) marks the neighborhood. He wrote the text for this work in 1938 as a prose poem, narrating from his perspective as a child, and it would become part of the preamble to his autobiographical Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel A Death in the Family.
The American composer Samuel Barber set it to music in 1947. Stephen Ledbetter, long-time program annotator for the Boston Symphony, describes the work:
Barber’s setting of James Agee’s remarkable prose poem depicts a summer evening in the back yard with the whole family assembled, as seen through the eyes of a small child. Both text and music appear deceptively simple—the thoughts of a child methodically cataloguing all the people and things that form part of its life.
Ledbetter also reproduces the text of the work at the link, and I strongly suggest reading the text before you listen.
It may have been peaceful to a six-year-old in Knoxville in 1915, but it certainly was not a peaceful year elsewhere with WWI blazing in Europe. Major difficulties were on the horizon for people in America as well, whether they knew it or not, and for Agee who would shortly lose his father. From the publisher’s description of A Death in the Family:
Agee creates an overwhelmingly powerful novel of innocence, tenderness, and loss that should be read aloud for the sheer music of its prose.
Barber scored the work for orchestra and soprano, but the composer also created the piano reduction. I’m drawn to the purity and clarity of this performance by tenor Russell Thomas.
