A friend, who is a voice teacher and a professor of voice at a local university, was discussing what she is going to assign to her students. She mentioned Barber’s “Sure on this Shining Night”, and I realized that I have only posted one piece by Barber: Knoxville Summer of 1915 (https://classicalmusicandmusicians.com/2025/06/03/knoxville-summer-of-1915-eleanor-steber-soprano-redux/). I decided to remedy that with this post.
Barber’s most famous work is Adagio for Strings, which has become an iconic piece in American classical music and is frequently performed at solemn occasions. Other significant compositions include his Violin Concerto, Piano Sonata, Knoxville: Summer of 1915, and two symphonies. Barber also wrote operas, such as Vanessa, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1958, and Antony and Cleopatra, which premiered at the opening of the Metropolitan Opera’s new house at Lincoln Center in 1966.
Barber’s style is often described as neo-Romantic, blending lush harmonies and expressive melodies with modern sensibilities. He resisted the more experimental trends of his time, remaining committed to tonality and emotional directness. Barber was highly regarded for his ability to write for the human voice, producing numerous art songs and choral works that remain staples of the repertoire.
I hope that you enjoy these selections.
Sure on this Shining Night begins at 2:44
Sure on this Shining Night
Sure on this shining night
Of star made shadows round,
Kindness must watch for me
This side the ground.
The late year lies down the north.
All is healed, all is health.
High summer holds the earth.
Hearts all whole.
Sure on this shining night I weep for wonder wand’ring far alone
Of shadows on the stars.
These lyrics were taken from a larger poem by Agee:
Agee’s “Description of Elysium,” published in his 1934 poetry collection Permit Me Voyage, depicts a perfect, peaceful, and timeless world of the blessed dead. However, it is a place “we can not come there,” and this ideal state stands in stark contrast to the harsh realities and sorrows of the earthly world.
The description of Elysium:
• Whole health and peace
• A timeless state
• No fear
• A tranquil landscape
• The absence of thought
The contrasting earthly experience
The poem’s celebrated middle section, often set to music as “Sure on this shining night,” presents the poet’s own earthly experience as an antithesis to the serenity of Elysium.
Earthly kindness: While the poet is on “this side the ground,” he hopes for kindness to “watch for me” in a world filled with “starmade shadows”.
• Hope and despair
• The pain of the living
This juxtaposition of hope and Elysium’s eternal spring emphasizes that the perfect world of Elysium is a place for the dead, not for the living.
Samuel Barber
March 9, 1910 – January 23, 1981
Samuel Barber was an American composer who is considered one of the most expressive representatives of the lyric and Romantic trends in 20th-century classical music.
Barber studied the piano from an early age and soon began to compose. In 1924 he entered the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where, in addition to piano and composition, he studied singing and conducting. After graduation in 1934, Barber devoted himself entirely to composition. His style was distinctive and modern but not experimental. He established his reputation with his overture to The School for Scandal (1933), based on Richard Sheridan’s comedy by that name, and with Music for a Scene from Shelley (1935), inspired by the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound.
Although many of Barber’s works make literary allusions, his music is not programmatic in the strict sense. Significant in this respect are the three Essays for Orchestra (1938, 1942, and 1978), which are intended as musical counterparts of the literary form. Structural considerations govern Barber’s instrumental writing; there is great astringency in harmony, but the basic tonality remains secure; the rhythmic lines are very strong, without loss of coherence.
In 1936 Barber composed his String Quartet. Its slow movement, arranged for string orchestra, was performed under the title Adagio for Strings by the NBC Symphony Orchestra under Arturo Toscanini in 1938 and acquired extraordinary popularity in the United States and Europe.
Barber’s Symphony No. 1 (1936; rev. 1942) is in the Romantic tradition. In the Symphony No. 2 (1944; rev. 1947), commissioned by the U.S. Army Air Forces (which he had joined in 1943), Barber introduced an electronic instrument imitating radio signals for air navigation, an effect replaced in the revised version by an E-flat clarinet.
Barber also wrote a Violin Concerto (1941) and a Cello Concerto (1946). His Piano Sonata (1949) is a monument of 20th-century American piano music. His other compositions include Dover Beach, for voice and string quartet (1931); three vocal works with orchestra, Knoxville: Summer of 1915 (1948), Prayers of Kierkegaard (1954), and Andromache’s Farewell (1962); and Medea (1947). His opera Vanessa, with libretto by longtime partner Gian Carlo Menotti and produced by the Metropolitan Opera Association, New York City, in 1958, was awarded a Pulitzer Prize.
Barber’s Piano Concerto (1962) brought him new international success and another Pulitzer Prize. His opera Antony and Cleopatra inaugurated the new auditorium of the Metropolitan Opera Association at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in 1966. After a period of creative inactivity, Barber resumed composing for orchestra. The Lovers and Fadograph of a Yestern Scene were first performed in 1971, and Third Essay for Orchestra had its premiere in 1980.
Adagio for Strings, orchestra arrangement of the second movement of American composer Samuel Barber’s String Quartet (1936). It premiered on November 5, 1938. It has long been associated in the United States with national periods of mourning, having been performed at the funerals of U.S. presidents (Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy) and in the days following the September 11 attacks in 2001. It was also part of the film score for Oliver Stone’s Academy Award-winning film Platoon (1986).
The Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini first brought the Adagio for Strings to wide public attention. Impressed by some of Barber’s works that he had heard in performance in Europe, he asked Barber for music that his NBC Symphony might perform. Barber provided the scores for two short works: his Essay for Orchestra (to be the first of three such “essays”) and the Adagio for Strings. Toscanini premiered both works with the NBC Symphony in a broadcast concert and recorded the Adagio soon after.