![]() ![]() And this work that appeals to so many as an embodiment of collective national identity is simultaneously wrapped up in a highly personal response by Barber to a text of James Agee with a deeply autobiographical meaning for author and composer. ![]() Dating from an era just recovering from the cataclysm of World War II, 'Knoxville' can be seen as conjuring a gentler age, a state of lost innocence, which as its subsequent reception has showed proved an enduring site of cultural memory. The most ostensibly backward-looking, nostalgic work of this 'conservative', neoromantic composer, 'Knoxville' is yet atypical of Barber in that by most accounts it is the most American piece in an oeuvre otherwise rarely seen as touched by national flavour. Samuel Barber’s 'lyric rhapsody' for soprano and orchestra, 'Knoxville: Summer of 1915' (1947), is one of his most celebrated and complicated pieces. Despite and Still could be a culmination of Barber’s inferiority complex mentally conceived after the supposed degradation of his musical name. In my research project, I attempt to identify the White Goddess traits within Barber’s output, transmuted from strictly Muse worship to the expansion of his melancholic tendencies and a trajectory of an all-consuming internal and upward path. ![]() Robert Grave’s theory of Goddess worship as the primary incentive behind all the poet’s formation of poetic output is supposedly detectable through lyrical themes of nature, spirituality, and women (although Graves does not explicitly specify aspects of detectable Goddess worship traits in poetry). All three poets share stylistic similarities that establish an interconnectedness with Barber’s mental state during the compositional years of Despite and Still, thus contributing to the certainty that the usage of these poets was a deliberate choice on the part of Barber. Intertwined within the song cycle, for me, is a transfigured usage of the White Goddess concept, induced by the usage of poetry by Robert Graves, James Joyce, and Theodore Roethke. 41 is characterized as ‘musical therapy’ by Barbara Heymann, ‘emotionally distant’ by a reviewer, his’ ’ final defense against his Romantic style.’ Within this five-song cycle is the truthful predicament of his ‘melancholy’ character, and the elusive of his emotional state is stridently stripped away due to Barber’s perceived failure of his opera, Antony and Cleopatra. ![]()
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