3 Songs to Words by James Joyce Op.10 (1935–36)

Rain has fallen

Sleep now

I hear an army

The American composer Samuel Barber was proud of his family’s Irish ancestry – and surprised too by the extent of it, or so it seems from his account of his visit to Yeats’s grave at Drumcliff in Co. Sligo: “Lo and behold, Yeats was surrounded, nay, he lay in the very bosom of a family – tombstones of uncles, cousins, brothers, sisters on every side of him – of Barbers.” He set only one Yeats poem, The Secrets of the Old (1938), but he was drawn at an early stage to James Stephens and he had a particular interest in the work of James Joyce, above all the Chamber Music collection published in 1907. Beginning, appropriately enough with Strings in the Earth and Air, he set six poems from Chamber Music, including the three songs of Op.10. He later ventured into Finnegans Wake for Nuvoletta (1947) and Ulysses for Solitary Hotel (1968–9). There is also an orchestral piece, Fadograph of a Yestern Scene (1971) inspired by an evocative line in Finnegans Wake.

The 3 Songs to Words by James Joyce bear little resemblance to the Irish ballads Barber apparently used to sing, to his own accompaniment, to entertain his friends. They are sophisticated “art” songs written consciously as a three-part cycle. Barber’s treatment of Rain has fallen would seem excessively dramatic if it were not to be heard in the same context as I hear an army. The first song begins with a poetic evocation of rain in the gently pattering piano figuration. But the piano interlude is significantly more emphatic in expression and, although the rain continues to fall in the second stanza, it is now in in a lower register whle the voice is concerned more with internal matters, rising to an unexpected intensity of passion on the last line, “Speak to your heart.” If the following outburst of anguish in the piano part, before the vocal line sinks into quiet pathos, seems disproportionate here, it falls into place in relation to “My love, why have you left me alone?” at the end of the cycle.

Sleep now is an uneasy but ultimately peaceful interlude before the tumult anticipated in the second stanza breaks out in I hear an army, which is a vividly clangorous evocation of inimical militancy and emotional catastrophe.