ABSTRACT
Since its premiere, Samuel Barber’s Despite and Still has been criticized for its incongruous texts. Poems by Robert Graves and Theodore Roethke and an excerpt from James Joyce’s Ulysses form an unlikely group and address such varied topics as romantic jealousy, infidelity, pious suffering, and creative muse. Barber’s biographer, Barbara Heyman, justifies the collection by pointing to several negative circumstances in Barber’s life, among them his crumbling relationship with Gian Carlo Menotti. This chapter expands upon Heyman’s biographical interpretation by connecting aspects of Barber’s queer biography with the cycle’s text-expressive use of standard metric manipulations, techniques that have typically been associated with eighteenth-century compositional practice. In so doing, this chapter presents a queer reading of Barber’s cycle, one in which the interpenetration of queer biography, text, and compositional technique unifies the five seemingly disparate texts.
