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Despite and Still Videos

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This is my Despite and Still by Samuel Barber set from my graduate recital. I must give great thanks for PhoebeJoy who worked so hard with me on these pieces and to my dad who after first hearing the texts in isolation immediately figured out what was going on in this cycle.

It’s amazing that since then I have come to realize even more about the cycle. I am so happy that the arc of artistry is a long one, because as I grow as a human being, these pieces will only become richer for me to perform.

Despite and Still Part III: “A Last Song”, “My Lizard”, and Some Conclusions

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[for thoughts on “In the Wilderness”, and “Despite and Still” and “Solitary Hotel”]

The first two songs of Despite and Still are “A Last Song” and “My Lizard (Letter Wish for to a Young Love)”. Since this whole discussion of this cycle has been backwards, I will talk about “Lizard” first.

Samuel Barber

Samuel Barber

“My Lizard (Wish for a Young Love)”

“My Lizard”, original poem “Wish for a Young Wife” by Theodore Roethke, begins innocently enough, even comically:

My lizard, my lively writher,
May your limbs never whither,
May the eyes in your face
Survive the green ice
Of envy’s mean gaze;

The accompaniment is quick moving 16th notes. Personally, I wish sometimes that it would be played by a banjo because it would fit right in. Dr.Bruce Leslie Gibbons argues in his very thorough dissertation on the cycle that the piano is in fact demonstrating the flighty qualities of this lizard. It never stops except for one brief moment between the verses, and even at the end, once the singer has given up, the piano rushes headlong into oblivion with an instruction by the composer to not slow down at all.

Of course, being this cycle, the light humor is passing, because the second “verse” shows that sense of loss, loneliness, and isolation that pervade the cycle:

May you live out your life
Without hate, without grief,
And your hair ever blaze,
In the sun, in the sun,

When I am undone
When I am no one.

Even as he sings this, the piano never slows down. Despite his pain, the lizard still keeps going going going.

An interesting tidbit about this song is that Samuel Barber has changed the title to “My Lizard (Wish for a Young Love)” from “Wish for a Young Wife”. This implies a personal connection to the song. It also gives us clues on how to think of the song in relation to the cycle.

“A Last Song”

“A Last Song” is the title that Barber gave to Robert Graves’ poem “A Last Poem”:

A last song, and a very last, and yet another,
O, when can I give over?
Must I drive the pen until blood bursts from my nails,
And my breath fails and I shake with fever,
Or sit well wrapped in a many colored cloak
Where the moon shines new through Castle Crystal?
Shall I never hear her whisper softly:
“But this is truth written by you only,
And for me only;
Therefore, love, have done?”

It is in this song that we can find the most information about this cycle. In my key, the piano gives  a brief introduction that is in F# minor. The chords are dissonant with brief moments of respite. As the singer enters, two important things happen:

  1. The singer sings the, what I call, “Despite and Still” theme.
  2. The key changes to C minor, which is a tritone away from F# minor. The key F# minor is also the key of “Despite and Still”. It returns intrusively as the singer is contemplating the pain he must endure to continue writing. This implies that “A Last Song” and “Despite and Still” have a relationship.

Despite and Still Motive

The “Despite and Still” motive is hardly a leitmotiv religiously adhered to, but it is a major unifying device in the cycle. Throughout the piece, there are these rising leaps, followed by a smaller leap or a descent of a second. In this case, the motive is a rising minor sixth followed by a descending half step.

Where else can you find this motive? Well, actually the first motive the piano plays in the right hand is a variation on it. Throughout “A Last Song” it appears and re-appears frequently. In “My Lizard” the first motive in the piano is a variation on it as well as the first entrance of the singer. It’s harder to find in “In the Wilderness”, but it appears in the piano after the first time the singer sings “Walked in the wilderness”. The piano theme in “Solitary Hotel” with a rising fifth followed by a falling major second contains a variation on it. Also, the singer sings it on the words, “On solitary hotel paper she writes”. Most importantly, in “Despite and Still”, the line “To love despite and still” is that motive with all the steps in between spelled out.

There are others, and once you begin looking for it, it appears everywhere. Even in other pieces of his it is somewhat discernible. In Barber’s gorgeous “Serenade for Strings” many sections are that “Despite and Still” motive passed through different voices (I wasn’t the first to hear that. My girlfriend pointed it out to me).

And what does this motive do? I believe that it is the slow budding understanding of what the composer is trying to achieve. The cycle is entitled “Despite and Still”, and the moment when those words are sung is the most complete version of the motive.  Thus, it is the idea that has not been totally understood by the composer of the songs. The previously mentioned Dr. Gibbons argues that the motive is actually the movement of seconds that appears throughout. His idea is a good one, but I just hear that as an abbreviation of the main motive, which would make sense if we think of the motive itself as being continually developed throughout the cycle.

My Belief About Despite and Still

I believe that this cycle is the embodiment of the frustration of creation. It is as if the composer is trying to create his last work of importance (“A Last Song”), struggles through several drafts that never quite achieve what he wants (“My Lizard”, “In the Wilderness”, Solitary Hotel”) and then finally cuts to the chase and just says what he means without ambiguity in “Despite and Still”. Of course, whatever need he has that prompted this journey is a painful one.  “Despite and Still” is not “All You Need is Love”. It appears that a real sense of anguish and loss is at the heart of this cycle. Whoever is doing the loving despite and still is doing it in very masochistic fashion.

And what is causing such anguish? It could have been a number of things. For one, his relationship was straining with Gian Carlo Menotti. Another idea is that he had been humiliated by the debacle of Antony and Cleopatra and yet was still composing. The end of the ’60s for Barber were tough ones, and all of his trials are probably in some way reflected in these songs.

A final thought: I am sure I will learn more about these songs as I continue to research and perform them. Also, some things that are important like the use of cannons and pedal point have been left out, but here I just wanted to give a broad overview of a work that is very confusing.

If you have any ideas, I would love to hear them.

Despite and Still: Part II “In the Wilderness”

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[for thoughts on “Despite and Still” and “Solitary Hotel” see here.]

The middle song in Samuel Barber’s cycle Despite and Still is titled “In the Wilderness”, and like the first and last (one and five thescapegoat-williamholmanhuntrespectively) the poem is Robert Graves’. Graves wrote it when he was young, and his belief in the Christian God and accompanying theology was still intact. Its subject is Jesus’ temptation in the desert, though Graves expands the details dramatically.

Barber’s music is enchanting almost like a lullaby. The key remains intact throughout the first section (in my key it’s Fm) and the words reflect this calm:

He, of his gentleness,
Thirsting and hungering,
Walked in the wilderness.
Soft words of grace he spoke
Unto lost desert folk
That listened wondering,
He heard the bittern call
From ruined palace wall,
Answered him brotherly,
He held communion,
With the she-pelican
Of lonely piety.

However, like everything in this cycle, not everything is as it seems. The calmness of the piece is upset by the middle section where the words speak of more dangerous and devious happenings:

Basilisk, cocatrice
Flocked to his homilies,
With mail of dread device,
With monstrous barbed stings,
With eager dragon eyes;
Great bats on leathern wings
And old, blind broken things
Mean in their miseries.

That section is very exciting because the tonal area shifts quickly and becomes obscured. Underneath the bat lines are parallel motions in the piano that remind me of some prehistoric dance rhythm. The time is 6/8, but the rhythm in the piano functions like 5/8. And then there is a transitional measure where the piano plays some blissed out open fifths piled on top of one another.

The third section is similar to the first, but hardly exact. The melody and harmony struggle at the description of a new character:

Then ever with him went,
Of all his wanderings
Comrade, with ragged coat,
Gaunt ribs, poor innocent
Bleeding foot, burning throat,
The guileless young scapegoat:

Barber’s music is heavenly through much of this. Leading up to the word “scapegoat”, the piano builds the tension by using trills in the right hand, and once the tension is released, the trills are allowed to float above the pulse. It’s wonderful.The texture thins dramatically at the final lines of the poem:

For forty nights and days
Followed in Jesus’ ways,
Sure guard behind him kept,
Tears like a lover wept.

The trills now contain an element of dread as they flicker back an forth between C and Db (again, my key of Fm). I can feel the lonely wind on my back in the desert at the closing of this song, and the final chord with its accompanying trill has about as much foreshadowing as a piece of music can contain.  What is going on in the text itself?

I have spent hours trying to figure out what Graves meant by all of this. At first, my accompanist and friend Phoebe Joy suggested that Graves might have been expanding the relationship between John the Baptist and Jesus, and that the character through most of the song was, in fact, John the Baptist. This could be plausible because the events of the song line up similarly to those of John’s appearance in Matthew. I agreed and accepted it as my working hypothesis.

However, after some further research in Robert Graves: His Life and Work, it turns out that the key word is “scapegoat”. I had never questioned what the word meant, but in fact “scapegoat” is a proper term for a particular goat that is mentioned in Leviticus:

Lev 16:21 And Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat, and confess over him all the iniquities of the children of Israel, and all their transgressions in all their sins, putting them upon the head of the goat, and shall send [him] away by the hand of a fit man into the wilderness:
Lev 16:22 And the goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities unto a land not inhabited: and he shall let go the goat in the wilderness.

So, Graves has created this image of two, for lack of a better term, sin-bearers who are suffering and isolated, besides each other, in the wilderness. It is a terrifically lonely thought, which is fitting for this particularly lonely song cycle.

Despite and Still Pt. I: “Despite and Still” “Solitary Hotel”

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For the past 4 or 5 months I have been pondering Samuel Barber’s song cycle Despite and Still op. 41. I first heard it listening to the complete songs album with Thomas Hampson singing and John Browning on piano. Through their performances – along with Cheryl Studer’s – I was taken by Despite and Still and the whole corpus of Barber’s songs.

Barber’s songs are extraordinary for their good humor, sensitive emotional rendering, and  fascinating texts. The variety is also outstanding. Think of “St. Ita’s Vision” in the same cycle as “Promiscuity” in Hermit Songs.

After listening to these songs several times and singing them, I became more and more drawn to Despite and Still. These songs are wildly mysterious, and the challenges to the singer attempting them are myriad. The melodies are vocally challenging, and the texts are difficult to understand. Three of them – “A Last Song”[originally “A Last Poem”], “In the Wilderness”, and “Despite and Still” – are poems by Robert Graves. One – “My Lizard”- is by Theordore Roethke. And one – “Solitary Hotel” – is an excerpt from James Joyce’s Ulysses.

“Despite and Still”

The last and title song “Despite and Still” is violent and demanding. If we were to remove the singing, the person speaking might very well be shouting. The piano lays chords underneath the poor singer that make entire scales chordal tones and plays imitative harsh jabbing motives in parallel octaves. The speaker demands of his/her unnamed other that they both put other loves aside to “love despite and still”. Why does Barber set these thoughts to such upsetting music?

Have you not read
The words in my head,
And I made part
Of your own heart?
We have been such as draw
The losing straw —
You of your gentleness,
I of my rashness,
Both of despair —
Yet still might share
This happy will:
To love despite and still.
Never let us deny
The thing’s necessity,
But, O, refuse
To choose,
When chance may seem to give
Loves in alternative.

(Barber then adds for…emphasis?)

To love despite and still.

“Solitary Hotel”

The song that is perhaps the “hit” of the bunch is “Solitary Hotel”  because of its catchy and – let’s admit it – sexy tango line in the piano. It is by far the most perplexing of the group, though. The piano plays a rubato laced line with a 6/8 feel in the right hand and a tango habanera beat in the left while the singer intones two or three syllable utterances.

The text is describing a scene, but the manner in which it’s described is bleak and certainly “solitary”:

Solitary hotel in mountain pass. Autumn. Twilight. Fire lit. In dark corner young man seated. Young woman enters. Restless. Solitary. She sits. She goes to window. She stands. She sits. Twilight. She thinks. On solitary hotel paper she writes. She thinks. She writes. She sighs. Wheels and hoofs. She hurries out. He comes from his dark corner. He seizes solitary paper. He holds it toward fire. Twilight. He reads. Solitary. What? In sloping, upright and backhand: Queen’s hotel. Queen’s hotel. Queen’s ho-

It’s a Puzzle

I feel like only after digging into them for so many months am I beginning to understand this grouping.

I will have more to say about the other songs over the next few months, but there seems to be some use of what Verdi scholars would call tinta in them that may be the basis for  relationship between the songs.  I am not prepared to say that they have a clear cut story though.

If anyone who reads this blog over the next couple of months has worked on these songs or heard a performance that struck them, I would love to hear about it.