Samuel Barber's Mélodies passagères ("passing melodies") were written in two batches. The first ("Puisque tout passe"), fourth ("Le clocher chante"), and fifth ("Départ") songs were composed early in 1950 for the American soprano Eileen Farrell to sing at a Washington D.C. concert in April 1951, at which Barber accompanied her at the piano. The second and third songs ("Un cygne," "Tombeau dans un parc"), more somber and reflective than the others, were composed that same April; the French baritone Pierre Bernac and the composer-pianist Francis Poulenc gave the premiere of the full cycle in Paris, appropriately, in February of 1952. The published songs are dedicated to the two of them. Barber is perhaps the most distinguished composer of vocal music that America has yet produced, and he was among the most sophisticated of American composers in terms of his literary background. In addition to an exhaustive knowledge of verse in English, he was also well read in the leading French, German and Italian writers: Goethe, Dante and James Joyce were leading interests of his. (It has been said that Barber was never without a poetry book at his bedside.) And yet these "mélodies" are the only songs for which Barber set poems in a foreign language—-the texts are drawn from the "Poèmes français" of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke (who, in another exception, usually wrote in German). While the composer's previous songs had been deeply influenced by the heritage of German lieder, these "mélodies" lie in the stylistic orbit of Debussy and Fauré in their quasi-parlando vocal delivery, their mysterious, perfumed tone and their saturation in harmonies of extended triads. They are terse, pithy, melancholic and strangely designed. Rilke's texts, despite Barber¹s chosen title, sing of stasis as much as travel, and the composer is alert to the soft touch of the poet's gently shifting images. The first song evokes movement best ("Since all things pass, let's make a passing melody..."), and here we are most aware of the composer's formidable gift of counterpoint, gleaned from daily study of J.S. Bach: its accompaniment is based on canonic entries, in short and long rhythms, of the first four notes of the vocal part. The rest evoke their literary images with great exactitude. "Un cygne" uses rolling minor-key arpeggios in the left hand to evoke the water on which a swan swims, while tremolos of fourths shake in the right hand like his shifting image; the swan moves but the harmonies are almost fixed, hence "a painting that glides....a whole moving space." The soft summer light falling on a child's "tomb in a park" is etched in slowly alternating chords of perfect fourths and fifths, its often four-voice texture redolent of Barber's American, Protestant frugality, persisting even among such sensuously French words. Like the next song, "The bell tower sings," its harmony is more modal than tonal, but this little tale of a carillon¹s singing out to the boys and girls of Valais is slammed out in repetitive sixteenth notes over the same crashing chords; the limpid vocal writing of the previous two songs is replaced by rapid recitative. In the ambiguous, dissonant finale, a boy tells his sweetheart the place of his "Departure" by indicating a black dot on a map, transformed by Barber into a constant G pedal in the piano's middle range. While these songs may be Barber's most unusual, they are also among his very best.

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