Dover Beach: The sea is calm to-night

Composed when Samuel Barber was just 21, still a student at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute, Dover Beach (1931) is a startlingly mature work—a foretaste of all to come from a composer with an instinctive understanding of the human voice. Barber, himself a fine baritone singer, sets Matthew Arnold’s poem—a moonlit seascape that darkens into a lament for a broken world—for solo baritone and string quartet. This is chamber music—not song and accompaniment, but a partnership of equals. While the singer’s line hovers and swells still and sure, with a psalm’s combination of flexibility and certainty, the quartet surges around it, catching not just the “grating roar of pebbles” but also the turning tide of human existence itself. The sea might be “calm” in Arnold’s opening line, but rhythms that rock and churn inexorably underneath hint at the brooding melancholy soon to be revealed. The song closes, unexpectedly, as it began; suffering and anxiety mean nothing to nature, unchanging and eternal.