Barber: Knoxville: Summer of 1915

Samuel Barber (1910-1981)

Knoxville: Summer of 1915

Barber came across James Agee’s prose-poem 'Knoxville: Summer of 1915' in an anthology in 1946 when he was searching for something suitable to set to music in response to a commission from the soprano Eleanor Steber. Agee’s text, written in 1938, is a vivid and romantic evocation of the Tennessee summers of his childhood. 1915 was a significant year for Agee; it was the last summer he spent with his father, who was killed in a car accident the following year. The text's rosy nostalgia is thus tinged with a melancholy for an unrecoverable time. After his untimely death in 1955 it was incorporated into his posthumously published novel A Death in the Family, which is based on the events surrounding his father’s death.

Barber was immediately struck by how closely the summer evening Agee described paralleled his own childhood memories: “You see, it expresses a child’s feeling of loneliness, wonder, and lack of identity in that marginal world between twilight and sleep,” he explained in an interview recorded to accompany the first broadcast performance in 1949. He later recalled that “Agee’s poem was vivid and moved me deeply, and my musical response that summer of 1947 was immediate and intense. I think I must have composed Knoxville within a few days.” It was not simply childhood memories that were stirred by reading Agee’s words; as Barber composed his setting, his own father was gravely ill, and died only a few months after Knoxville’s composition. Barber dedicated the work to him.

Barber uses about a third of the original text in his setting, and quotes Agee’s opening sentence at the head of the score: “We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville Tennessee in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child.” The text moves between the viewpoint of the child experiencing the scene, and the adult’s recollection of it, so fluidly that it is often ambiguous which perspective we are experiencing.

In 1915 the First World War was raging in Europe, but America had yet to be drawn into it. This sense of two eras grating against each other is what gives Knoxville its power and lifts it above cosy nostalgia. We hear it in the way the easy, secure rocking of the opening is suddenly interrupted by the intrusion of a streetcar, a herald of the new century that is about to obliterate the old certainties, and also in the climactic payer: “May God bless my people, my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my good father, oh, remember them kindly in their time of trouble; and in the hour of their taking away.”