The poem begins with an evocation of the calm sea, with the lovers looking out from their window and seeing the lights gleaming across the Channel from the French coast. Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, To one another! For the world which seems The poem, says Mellers, expresses “that cry of a young heart, lonely in a hostile world in which Faith is extinct”.
That’s first exemplified in his early setting of Matthew Arnold’s poem Dover Beach for voice and string quartet. The “true Barber” emerges when his focus is on the personal, on “a specific child ‘realized’ in sound”. Mellers believes Barber is less successful when he tries (as in the opera Vanessa) to universalize this theme in an adult way, as some kind of “idealized abstraction of an American Past”, or when he attempts big romantic gestures (as in the First Symphony). Samuel Barber’s primary theme is his exploration of adolescence, lost childhood and youth, according to Wilfrid Mellers (in Chapter 9 of Music in a New Found Land, 1964).
0 kommentar(er)
