6 Songs

O Boundless, Boundless Evening Op.45 No.3 (1972)

A Nun takes the Veil Op.13 No.1 (1937)

The Secrets of the Old Op.13 No.2 (1938)

Sure on this Shining Night Op.13 No.3 (1938)

Solitary Hotel Op.41 No.4 (1968–9)

Nocturne Op.13 No.4 (1940)

The Samuel Barber group begins at the end – with, that is to say, his last song, O Boundless, Boundless Evening, which is an appropriately beautiful example of his art. Its distinction rests not so much in the word-setting, sensitive though it is, as in a piano part which evolves from an apparently conventional accompaniment to a parallel elegy with its most expressive melodic development revealed in the interlude after “in brilliant bays.” The piano dissonance heard at the beginning of the song returns to find its long-term resolution as night falls in the short postlude.

Written at less than half the age he was when he wrote the Three Songs Op.45 (for Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau), Barber’s Four Songs Op.13 are obviously less sophisticated in harmony and texture. Indeed, A Nun Takes the Veil is single-mindedly focused on the conviction of the nun’s declaration. It is supported by plain, often arpeggiated piano chords in a tonal framework unshaken by the harmonic deflections that occur at the end of each stanza. The Secrets of the Old is a delightful quintuple-time diversion before another expression of faith, though of a different kind, in Sure on this Shining Night, where no harmonic doubts intrude on a vocal line all the more enchanting for its canonic treatment in the piano part. Interpolated before the last song in the Op.13 set, Solitary Hotel, with its wittily laconic phrasing and its seductive hints of tango in the piano part, should prove effective in offsetting the mounting passion of the concluding Nocturne.