One can certainly think of more devout ways to celebrate All Saints’ Day than with those marginalia of anonymous Irish monks that inspired Samuel Barber to compose his cycle of ten Hermit Songs (Opus 29). However, there is something to be said for texts the celebrate those of us who are merely human and can only aspire to any higher plane. Barber’s selection certainly covers a broad swathe of human attributes, with ribaldry at one extreme:
I do not know with whom Edan will sleep,
but I do know that fair Edan will not sleep alone.
That couplet could just as easily have been found in the Carmina Burana collection of the Benediktbeuern monks. However, another text might be mistaken for having originated as Japanese haiku:
Sweet little bell, struck on a windy night,
I would liefer keep tryst with thee
Than be
With a light and foolish woman.
Every reader of these marginal scratchings is sure to find something to resonate with his/her own personal character. Mine shows up in “The Monk and His Cat,” given a particularly elegant (not to mention free) translation by W. H. Auden:
You rejoice when your claws
Entrap a mouse;
I rejoice when my mind
fathoms a problem.
What makes Barber’s settings of these texts so effective is that he introduces vocal lines of a deceptive folk-like simplicity and sets them against elaborate embellishing tropes in the piano accompaniment with adventurous instances of dissonance that are just as adventurously resolved. While the sources may have been Irish, one might almost call the music a celebration of American spirit, which would be appropriate for a work composed in 1953 for the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation and first performed at the Library of Congress (sung by soprano Leontyne Price with Barber at the piano).
At today’s Noontime Concerts™ recital at Old St. Mary’s Cathedral, the soprano was Shauna Fallihee; and her accompanist was Miles Graber. Fallihee was clearly comfortable with Barber’s unabashed Americanism. Indeed, she seemed to have found just the right tone for her voice to balance the almost conversational folk style with the more polished sonorities suitable for recital. From that point of balance, her delivery meshed perfectly with Graber’s account of the intricacies of the piano part.
Fallihee chose to couple Hermit Songs with John Harbison’s Mirabai Songs, composed 30 years later in 1983, to complete her program. This collection of six songs parallels Barber’s collection in that it consists of non-standard religious texts from an earlier time and place. In this case, however, the time is the sixteenth century; and the place is India. Mirabai was the wife of a soldier killed in battle, and she rejected the traditional obligation to lie with his body on his funeral pyre. She left her family and wandered the streets singing and dancing to ecstatic poems written to the god Krishna. Mirabai Songs draws upon six of these poems translated into English by Robert Bly.
Harbison’s collection also parallels Barber’s with particularly intricate piano accompaniment. However, Harbison is more inclined towards atonality, which entails a different approach to the nature of the concepts of both dissonance and resolution. As a result the ecstatic spirit of the texts never really established any of the visceral qualities that Barber could evoke from the far more casual sources of his Irish monks. Having not heard this cycle previously performed, I cannot in any honesty say whether that “shortcoming of spirit” could be attributed to the performer or the score. Certainly, there was no shortage of the visceral in the preview excerpt from Harbison’s opera The Great Gatsby, given last month by the BluePrint Project; but Harbison composed that opera over fifteen years after completing the Mirabai Songs. One hypothesis is that the earlier songs were the product of a more cerebral composer still reflecting the academic influences of his teachers, Walter Piston and Roger Sessions, while, by the time of the Gatsby commission, he had become more of a “working musician,” more confident in the expressiveness of his own intuitions. Whatever the case may be, Fallihee’s program provided much to consider in the work of two major American composers of the twentieth century.
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