Despite and Still Op.41 (1968-9)

A Last Song

My Lizard

In the Wildnerness

Solitary Hotel

Despite and Still

For the last fifteen years of his life - beginning perhaps with the failure of his opera Antony and Cleopatra at the Met in 1966 , although there were personal problems too - Samuel Barber was not a happy man. But, while his productivity slowed down, his harmonic language became tougher and, given the right kind of stimulus, he could write music at least as interesting as that of his gilded youth. One such stimulus was the work of Robert Graves, three of whose poems furnish the beginning, the middle and the end of a set of songs written for Leontyne Price between 1968 and 1969. The new language is evident immediately in the dissonant fanfare motif that opens and runs through much of A Last Song. The light-textured My Lizard and the witty Solitary Hotel with its subtle tango allusions are charming diversions from the pain of In the Wilderness and the strictures of Despite and Still.