BBC Music Magazine

<p>We choose some of the finest works by the last great American Romantic, Samuel Barber</p>

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This brooding song for baritone and string quartet, written in the days preceding World War II, might be taken as an attempt to warn, for it sets with almost miraculous appropriateness one of the grimmest poems of World War I. It is a marvel of lyricism, yet is mysteriously touching throughout. Incidentally, Barber was a well-trained singer and, singing this piece, became perhaps the only classical composer to sing one of his own works on a professional, major-label recording. ---All Music Guide



Dover Beach

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.


Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)


Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (baritone)
Juilliard Quartet

Samuel Barber - "Dover Beach", Op. 3  Fischer-Dieskau, Juilliard Quartet

We choose some of the finest works by the last great American Romantic, Samuel Barber

Five essential works by Samuel Barber

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Adagio

Dover Beach

Knoxville: Summer of 1915

Violin Concerto

Vanessa

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