Gershwin: Porgy and Bess Program Notes

Not all great works of music are born from drama, satire, or the bustle of city life. Sometimes they come from memory — from a quiet moment so vividly recalled that it becomes timeless. Samuel Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915 is such a piece.

Barber was 37 when he read James Agee’s prose poem of the same name. Agee, writing in 1938, recalled a summer evening of his childhood in Knoxville, Tennessee: porches, rocking chairs, streetcars, parents chatting while children drowsed on their laps. The text is both ordinary and profound, carrying the ache of nostalgia for innocence and the awareness of its fleetingness. Barber, then caring for his dying father, felt a deep kinship with Agee’s words, and in them he found a reflection of his own memories of childhood.

Barber’s score captures the flow of memory. The soprano’s line hovers between speech and song, unfolding like a child’s dreamy narration. The orchestra shifts seamlessly from shimmering stillness to sudden surges of sound, mirroring how recollections can leap from the ordinary to the overwhelming.

We hear the hush of a summer night in the opening, strings and winds rocking gently like a porch swing. Soon the music brightens into a bustling street scene: the clatter of streetcars, the hum of voices, the vividness of life glimpsed through a child’s eyes. Then, without warning, the music turns inward. Barber writes melodies of rapt simplicity, almost hymn-like, as the child contemplates the mystery of life, death, and belonging.

The effect is hypnotic. Barber never forces the drama; instead, he lets the images drift by, woven together in an unbroken stream. At the close, the soprano voice softens to a near whisper, as the child drifts into sleep under the protective gaze of family and sky.

Though rooted in Agee’s Southern childhood, Knoxville: Summer of 1915 speaks to something universal. Nearly everyone has known such evenings: the warmth of family close at hand, the comfort of being small in a vast world, the awareness — dim even in childhood — that such moments cannot last forever. Barber’s music transforms that recognition into sound, at once intimate and expansive, nostalgic and consoling.

Placed alongside Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess and Bernstein’s Candide, Barber’s Knoxville offers a striking contrast. Gershwin brings us the streets of Catfish Row, full of laughter and heartbreak; Bernstein spins Voltaire’s satire into glittering overture and operetta. Barber turns inward, finding America not in spectacle or satire but in memory: a summer porch, a child’s drowsy wonder, the eternal hush of twilight.

Barber once described Knoxville as “lyric rhapsody.” That phrase is perfect. It is rhapsodic in the way memories tumble together, shifting from one scene to the next. And it is lyric in the way every line seems to sing, as natural as breath.

More than a setting of Agee’s words, Knoxville is Barber’s elegy for innocence — his own, Agee’s, ours. In its quiet way, it stands beside Gershwin and Bernstein as another vision of America: not brash or satirical, but tender, timeless, and profoundly human.

“Knoxville: Summer of 1915”
A Prose Poem by James Agee

It has become the time of evening
when people sit on their porches,
rocking gently and talking gently
and watching the street
and the standing up
into their sphere of possession of the trees,
of birds’ hung havens, hangers.
People go by; things go by.
A horse, drawing a buggy, breaking his hollow iron music on the asphalt;
a loud auto; a quiet auto;
people in pairs, not in a hurry,
scuffling, switching their weight of aestival body, talking casually,
the taste hovering over them of vanilla, strawberry, pasteboard and starched milk,
the image upon them of lovers and horsemen, squared with clowns in hueless amber.

A streetcar raising its iron moan:
stopping, belling and starting; stertorous; rousing and raising again its iron increasing moan
and swimming its gold windows and straw seats on past and past and past,
the bleak spark crackling and cursing above it like a small malignant spirit set to dog its tracks;
the iron whine rises on rising speed;
still risen, faints; halts; the faint stinging bell;
rises again, still fainter, fainter, lifting, lifts, faints forgone: forgotten.
Now is the night one blue dew.
Now is the night one blue dew,
my father has drained,
now he has coiled the hose.
Low on the length of lawns,
a frailing of fire who breathes …
Parents on porches: rock and rock.
From damp strings morning glories hang their ancient faces.
The dry and exalted noise of the locusts from all the air at once enchants my eardrums.
On the rough wet grass of the backyard my father and mother have spread quilts.
We all lie there, my mother, my father, my uncle, my aunt, and I too am lying there …
They are not talking much, and the talk is quiet,
of nothing in particular, of nothing at all in particular, of nothing at all.
The stars are wide and alive, they seem each like a smile of great sweetness, and they seem very near.

All my people are larger bodies than mine…
with voices gentle and meaningless like the voice of sleeping birds.
One is an artist, he is living at home.
One is a musician, she is living at home.
One is my mother who is good to me.
One is my father who is good to me.
By some chance, here they are, all on this earth;
and who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth,
lying, on quilts, on the grass, in a summer evening, among the sounds of the night.
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.

After a little I am taken in and put to bed.
Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her:
and those receive me, who quietly treat me,
as one familiar and well-beloved in that home:
but will not, no ,will not, not now, not ever;
but will not ever tell me who I am.