Hermit Songs Op.29

At Saint Patrick’s Purgatory

Church Bell at Night

Saint Ita’s Vision

The Heavenly Banquet

The Crucifixion

Sea-Snatch

Promiscuity

The Monk and his Cat

The Praises of God

The Desire for Hermitage

“I have come across some poems of the 10th century, translated into modern English by various people,” Samuel Barber wrote to his mentor Sidney Homer, ”and am making a song cycle of them to be called, perhaps, Hermit Songs. These were extraordinary men, monks or hermits or what not, and they wrote these little poems on the corners of the manuscripts they were illuminating or just copying. I find them very direct, unspoiled and often curiously contemporaneous in feeling (much like the Fioretti of St Francis of Assisi).”

Interesting though these marginal poems are, however, they cannot have been easy to set to music - not so much because of the clumsy rhythms of some of the translations as because of the problem of creating a sound world appropriate to such a distant culture while retaining the immediacy of the sentiments expressed in the texts. Happily, Barber’s approach to setting them was not to submit them to some kind of medieval pastiche. Modal harmonies are clearly in evidence but more to avoid the diatonic commonplace than to suggest any specific sense of period. Barber seems to have asked himself what musical sounds would have been most familiar to his monks and hermits in the period between the 8th and 13th centuries and to have decided on bells and birdsong rather than plainchant.

Certainly, invoking the “King of the churches and the bells,” At Saint Patrick’s Purgatory resounds with tolling bells in the piano part almost throughout, while Church Bell at Night is coloured by a “sweet little” discord repeated in the pianist’s right hand over a gloomy bass line. Saint Ita’s Vision, on the other hand, is an intimate domestic scene with a melodious lullaby beginning at “Infant Jesus at my breast” and perhaps a hint of harps in the arpeggiated chords towards the end. Harmonically dislocated chimes offer a cheerful accompaniment to The Heavenly Banquet and, in grievous contrast, the first bird is heard at the beginning of The Crucifixion, its echoes persisting into the piano postlude. Bells are driven into a thunderous tolling by the wind of Sea-Snatch and stilled into the enigmatic harmonies of Promiscuity.

Auden’s translation of The Monk and his Cat inspired what, with its contented vocal line and its witty ritornello of gentle dissonances rising up the keyboard, must be the most attractive of the ten songs in the set, although The praise of God (to another Auden translation) is scarcely less entertaining in its dancing rhythms and delicate birdsong. A bell chimes mostly at one pitch at the beginning of The Desire for Hermitage before the piano part opens out, without the voice, to embrace the devoutly passionate climax of the whole set. The solitary bell returns with the openng line towards the end of the song.

Commissioned by the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation, the Hermit Songs were first performed by Leontyne Price with the composer at the piano at the Library of Congress, Washington, in 1954.