[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 respectively) 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.