#thomas schippers

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Rossini L’ASSEDIO DI CORINTO

Thomas Schippers

Beverly Sills, Shirley Verrett, Harry Theyard, Justíno Díaz

Giusto Ciel, in tal periglio  Gioacchino Rossini, “L’Assedio di Corinto” Beverly Sills Orchestra of La Scala, Chorus of La Scala, Thomas Schippers

Conductor Thomas Schippers, 1947

MEDIUM WELL

(Music and Other Media)

Leontyne Price - "Knoxville: Summer of 1915, Op. 24"1

(Composed by Samuel Barber)

At first, James Agee's short story "Knoxville: Summer of 1915" seems like an odd choice to adapt into a musical piece for operatic soprano and orchestra. Agee's recollection of his hometown2 is a very personal piece with a narrative voice that feels close to a person's interior monologue. When read,3 his words seem like those that are quietly said to oneself when recollecting childhood, which Agee was, essentially, doing. This story, in fact, seems like a piece that would actually be distinctly poorly suited for adaptation to music, as its introspective tone would clash harshly with the inherent public projection of singing.

And yet, Barber makes it work by using Agee's text as a jumping off point, not a rigid blueprint. He takes the author's flowing prose and chops it up into meter, pulling out the most effective lines and splitting sentences into key phrases. The result is that while the words are clearly Agee's, they've been rendered in a way that transforms them into a shape suitable for singing.

Interestingly, the closest antecedent to Barber's technique is sampling. While it might seem incorrect to compare the work of a seminal composer to that of a hip-hop producer, I think it actually makes a tremendous amount of sense. Is what Barber does to Agee's work all that dissimilar from what Kanye West has done to hundreds of soul records over the years? He's taking part of another work of art and adapting it to become part of a new work. Though most people would put opera and rap at opposite ends of the spectrum of "high art" and "low art," the technique displayed here pulls the two much closer than they typically would be.

Furthermore, this piece is also a wonderful example of combining the tone of musical composition with lyrics. Each part of the piece beautifully evokes the scene depicted in Agee's words. The beginning is light and calm, with a steady rhythm that pairs perfectly with the image of people sitting peacefully in rocking chairs on their porches as the day ends. Later, as a streetcar passes, the music becomes more discordant and staccato, mimicking the sound the trolley would make as it jostles along on the tracks. The best instance of this, however, may be the anxious, agitated rise in the music that follows the line "one is my father / who is good to me," which wonderfully encapsulates the complex viewpoint of Agee's story, which blends a child's voice and the voice of an adult looking back.4 

For all of these reasons, Barber's "Knoxville: Summer of 1915, Op. 24" is highly successful, as both an adaptation of Agee's story and as a musical work in and of itself. It's also a very accessible bit of opera, so I would recommend checking it out, even if that's not normally your scene.

-TWG

1. This is, in my opinion, the definitive version of Barber's piece. Price's vocals are gloriously full of life, and conductor Thomas Schippers draws absolutely luscious sounds from his orchestra. If you want to hear a sparser, less ornate arrangement, check out Eleanor Steber's version, which is just her and a piano accompaniment.

2. Knoxville has actually produced a fair amount of notable writers, including Agee, Cormac McCarthy, Nikki Giovanni, Frances Hodgson Burnett, and Quentin Tarantino (as well as the people who write the blog you're reading).

3. If you haven't read it, you can find it here. (If you have, it was probably at the front of his novel A Death in the Family. It shouldn't be there, according to the research of Agee scholar Michael Lofaro, who recently spent several years attempting to reconstruct the novel to its original form. His research found that the book was heavily edited following Agee's death, altering it significantly. If you want to read more then check out his work A Death in the Family: A Restoration of the Author's Text.) (Lofaro is also known for being the assistant coach of my youth soccer team.)