Listening Guide: Samuel Barber’s A HAND OF BRIDGE

Following the Gameplay

Nine minutes—that is the approximate duration of Samuel Barber’s one-act opera A Hand of Bridge, which premiered at the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy, in 1959. Setting a libretto by Barber’s longtime partner and collaborator Gian Carlo Menotti (also the founder of the festival in Spoleto), A Hand of Bridge uses a card game between two unhappily married couples as a framing device to explore the characters’ private thoughts. The short duration, simple setting, small cast, and taut form of Barber’s work are all hallmarks of the micro-opera, a small-scale genre embraced by a wide array of composers over the last century. While some contemporary composers have taken up the micro-opera for one-off engagements, often with the intention of codifying and recording a finalized version, A Hand of Bridge has largely entered the small-opera repertoire and is still frequently performed, both by professional companies and by university opera theatres and workshops, especially in Barber’s native United States. Despite its short duration (which, by the way, roughly corresponds with the amount of time needed to play a hand in bridge), Barber reveals a score that is at once strolling, preoccupied, and dark. As with much of the composer’s work, there is a high level of craftsmanship and artistry, creating an atmosphere that manages to blend malaise, boredom, lust, and longing. This listening guide will clarify Barber’s score and walk through the piece from start to finish.

Speaking of walking through the piece, Barber’s work opens with meandering, jazz-inflected piano riffs over a walking bass line. The combination of piano, bass, and wire brushes on a snare drum establishes a recognizable nightclub feel. This walking music, which represents the disinterested gameplay of our four characters, is composed almost objectively from Barber’s perspective: it is regular, clinical, unfeeling, even antiseptic. I will refer to this opening as the “gameplay music.” It becomes the structural anchor of the entire piece, returning throughout to provide transitions. We meet the four characters as they begin to play their hand. They are, in the order we hear them, Bill, Geraldine, Sally, and David. Bill, a lawyer, is married to Sally. Geraldine is married to David, who is described as a “florid businessman.” After setting the hand, each character in turn sings a short piece (called an arietta, or “little aria”) revealing secret thoughts. The other characters, of course, do not hear these individual expressions; like a dramatic soliloquy, these ariettas allow the audience to glimpse the characters’ internal monologues. At this early point, we already have the structural plan of Barber and Menotti’s work in place: the gameplay music plus four ariettas, one for each character. Naturally, that is an oversimplification; there is considerable nuance and finesse at work in this piece. To turn our attention in that loftier direction, we now move on to each of the ariettas in order, along with transitional materials that connect them.

The first arietta is Sally’s. Before it properly begins, we hear Sally complain that she is once again relegated to the role of “dummy.” In contract bridge, which the four characters here are playing, the players are grouped into two pairs. As the dummy, Sally has no ability to participate in the game decisions made by her partner, Bill, who is the “declarer.” Immediately we are flooded with potential layers of meaning, the most obvious being a double-entendre on the word “dummy.” There’s also a power dynamic established, with Sally subordinate to Bill. After Sally complains that she is “forever dummy,” Bill chides her to carry on with her role. Her arietta begins with a marked change in musical texture, as the piano drops out in favor of the full string section, plus woodwinds, percussion, and trumpet. The music here is urgent. Sally expresses her desire to buy a “hat of peacock feathers” she saw in a store that morning. The music wanders briefly as Sally muses on other fine hats she saw, but she quickly resolves that the peacock-feather hat is the best. Here we find an example of Barber’s use of “musical objects,” which are peppered throughout the score. Whenever Sally sings the line, “I want to buy that hat of peacock feathers,” or similar variants thereof, the melody comprises only two or three notes, a chant-like construction that communicates Sally’s obsessive desire. Her arietta ends by returning to the game, telling Bill to take his hands off the table. On cue, the flute plays a brief snippet of the gameplay music, preparing us for Bill’s monologue. This transition illustrates that the gameplay music represents, along with the card game itself, the mundane, the quotidian, the veneer of the present, and, most importantly, the passing of time.

Bill begins by dwelling on Sally’s “forever dummy” complaint. “Has she found out about Cymbaline?” he wonders. We quickly gather that Bill is having an affair with a woman named Cymbaline, and he sings a flowing, waltz-like melody relishing his mistress’s beauty. Enviously, Bill ponders where Cymbaline could be tonight. Is she with another lover? “Oh,” he sighs, “if only you were my wife, playing cards with me every night!” Barber threads Sally’s refrain—“I want to buy that hat of peacock feathers”—through Bill’s arietta, a juxtaposition that highlights the tension between Bill’s reality (bored at a card game with his wife) and his desire to be with Cymbaline. The waltzing flow of Bill’s melody represents another musical object, this time by way of a genre reference. The waltz is a dance with connotations of elegance and sophistication. At the same time, Barber taps into an archetypal image of a couple in love, clad in their finest clothes and dancing the night away. Bill is head over heels for Cymbaline, as evidenced by the rising repetitions of her name. Bill’s arietta ends with the orchestra repeating his waltz melody without him. Sally’s “peacock feather” refrain comes through twice more before our characters snap back to the game. “You have trumped the Queen,” says Sally.

The gameplay music returns in the piano, bass, and percussion. Next to lyricize is Geraldine. She wonders why Bill seems so distracted, quickly deciding that he is surely not thinking of her; he “no longer seeks” her foot under the table, hinting perhaps at a past rendezvous. Nor is Bill thinking of Sally, the wife he is no longer interested in, his “discarded Queen.” (At this point we can wonder how genuine Bill’s feelings for Cymbaline are.) The strings play a somber lament, the harmony uncertain and slipping; Geraldine asks if anyone could love her. Not Bill, the “knavish fool of hearts.” Not David, her “stock market husband.” Not her “football son,” nor her father, whose photograph she says is quickly fading. The music comes to rest. Over tranquil, pulsing string chords, Geraldine realizes “with deep feeling,” as Barber marks in his score, that only her mother could have loved her. But now it is nearly too late; Geraldine’s mother is ill, lying in her sickbed “hatching for herself the black wings of death.” The second half of Geraldine’s heartfelt arietta is the emotional climax of the opera, a prayerful pleading for more time with her mother. “Do not die, Mother, do not die yet.” When looking at the score here, one sees almost entirely whole and half notes, a compositional touch referred to as “white-note music” in the sacred repertoire; whether intentional or not, it adds so much to the scene—these long notes complement the purity of Geraldine’s longing. The profound sadness of this music illustrates Barber’s dramatic skill. Barbara Heyman, a scholar specializing in Barber’s work, reports that Menotti modeled Geraldine after Barber’s sister, Sara, who had a difficult relationship with their mother.

Barber falls off from this emotional peak with another “snap back to reality” — we hear a truncated version of Bill’s “Cymabline” waltz with Sally’s “peacock feather” line superimposed. After a few bars this transition collapses into the now expected gameplay music. David begins the final arietta. He begins by summarizing his current life: every day he works for Mr. Pritchett, whom he envies and despises, while every night he plays bridge with Sally, Bill, and Geraldine. The music here is broad, static, and exotically flavored, with references to vaguely “Asian” sounds. This complements Menotti’s libretto, wherein David wishes he could be as rich as “the Aga Khan” or “a maharajah.” This is a particularly common type of musical exoticism seen in 20th century Western art music: the composer introduces some element of foreignness or Otherness, but in a way that is objectified and filtered through a Western lens. (This exoticism often has an air of colonialism.) In the second part of David’s arietta, as he begins to more fully flesh out his secret desires, the music becomes more frenetic, with a jazz inflection not too unlike the gameplay music. David imagines being enormously wealthy, with a collection of “twenty naked girls and twenty naked boys” to see to his pleasure. He states his wish to pursue “every known perversion,” specifically referencing a book by Havelock Ellis he keeps hidden in his library. (Ellis was an English eugenicist who wrote about what he called “sexual deviations.”) Beyond all else, David voices a want for power, a desire to be feared. Interrupting this is Geraldine’s plea of “do not die, Mother,” which floats in and defuses David’s arrogant bombast. He relents, mourning that even if he were “rich as Morgan” he would still work for Mr. Pritchett, whom he hates, and still play bridge with Sally, Bill, and Geraldine. Fragments of their ariettas drift in, one after the other, as the gameplay music takes hold again. Our characters are returned to reality as the hand concludes.