Let’s take a moment to focus not just on the music, but also the words and where they came from.
Samuel Barber’s ‘Sure on this shining night’ was composed in 1938, taking two verses from a longer poem from contemporary poet James Agee, in his 1934 collection ‘Permit Me Voyage’. It’s a deceptively simple song, the ternary repeat including canonic imitation between piano and voice.
Its author, James Agee was was an American novelist, journalist, poet, screenwriter and film critic, writing for Time Magazine amongst others. He’s known as the author of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and as n as a co-writer of the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and as the screenwriter of the film classics The African Queen and The Night of the Hunter. His autobiographical novel, A Death in the Family (1957), won the author a posthumous 1958 Pulitzer Prize.
The full poem is here:
The Listening Project Blog 