Despite the great compositional technique Barber learned in his youth from dedicated study at the Curtis Institute of Music, his muse was a sensitive one, keenly affected by the circumstances of his life. The last fifteen years of Barber¹s life were not happy ones: his grand opera Anthony and Cleopatra had failed at the Metropolitan Opera in 1966; he and his longtime companion Gian Carlo Menotti decided to sell their Westchester, New York home "Capricorn," where they had lived for thirty years, with disastrous results for Barber; he became increasingly dependent on alcohol; and he was diagnosed in 1978 with the lymphatic cancer that would eventually kill him. The three songs of Op. 45 are wonderful things, but they need to be heard with this background in mind. Barber's chosen texts reflect not only his increasing mood of melancholia but, more importantly, his lifelong love affair with the English language. Only in the Mélodies passagères (1950-51) did he actually set poems in a foreign tongue, but the texts for the Op. 45 reflect his deep absorption in European culture as a whole. Each is an exceptionally fluent English translation of a Continental poem: James Joyce's "Now Have I Fed and Eaten Up the Rose" is based on the 19th century German of Gottfried Keller; Czeslaw Milosz transforms the surreal Polish verse of Jerzy Harasymowicz into "A Green Lowland of Pianos"; and Christopher Middleton's "O Boundless, Boundless Evening" is an elegant rendering of a German poem by Georg Heym. The songs were composed on commission from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and were premiered on April 29, 1974 by baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and pianist Charles Wadsworth. Keller's original poem is part of a cycle which concerns the disturbing prospect of a man buried alive; there is no terror in Barber's setting of this Joycean extract, but the accompaniment features an obsessive use of a single falling figure that suggests a protagonist with nowhere to go. The song is slow and doleful in an A minor key only occasionally inflected with chromatic harmony; it rises to a weary climax, then falls away. The next two songs also rely on repetitive piano figures independent of the vocal lines, which are always delivered with a liquid resignation, mostly staying in the middle range: these are evidence not only of Barber's sureness of touch in matching tones to words, but perhaps also of a sense of creative exhaustion. But "Green Lowland" is a gentle song full of funny surprises, and for the last one Barber writes one of his grandest and most nostalgic tunes to match "the glow/Of long hills on the skyline," soon to fade. These are landscape paintings as much as songs, made from an amalgam of straightforward, Anglo-Italian melody and harmonies which tastefully evoke Scriabin and Liszt while maintaining a strong personality of their own.

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