Dover Beach

In an era of great artistic upheaval and avant-garde experimentalism, American composer Samuel Barber navigated his own quiet course between extremes. Conservative by temperament, Barber typified a trend in composition that sought inspiration from abroad, but blended it with a deep interest in American (or at least English) idioms of folk music and poetry. His best-known work, the searing and serene Adagio for Strings, dates from 1936. Just 26 at the time, Barber was spending two years in Europe as winner of the prestigious Prix de Rome. Such success did not surprise his family. Samuel had been a child prodigy, composing musicals and light opera by age 10 and, four years later, was one of the first students to enter the new Curtis Institute in Philadelphia.
In 1931 Barber brought out his third published score, a setting of Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach. It was, and remains today, a classic of American song. The scoring for voice and string quartet is fairly novel; a clear precedent was Vaughan Williams' On Wenlock Edge. Barber actually played a draft of the song for the elder Vaughan Williams, who commented enthusiastically, “I tried several times to set Dover Beach, but you really got it.” Arnold's text progresses from poignant atmospherics, which the composer captures in gently oscillating lines, to an unrestrained melancholy where Barber gives his romanticism full sway. The emptiness of the final lines close the circle, bringing back the initial image and sound of wave-lapped cliffs: “we are here as on a darkling plain/ Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,/ Where ignorant armies clash by night.”

(c) Jason Stell