Nine minutes. That is the approximate duration of Samuel Barber’s one-act opera A Hand of Bridge, which premiered atthe Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy, in 1959. Setting a libretto by Barber’s longtime partner and collaboratorGian Carlo Menotti (also the founder of the festival in Spoleto), A Hand of Bridge uses a card game between twounhappily married couples as a framing device to explore the characters’ private thoughts. The short duration, single setting, small cast, and taut form of Barber’s work are all hallmarks of the micro-opera, a small-scale genre embracedby a wide variety of composers for the last century or so. While some contemporary composers have taken up the micro-opera as a vehicle 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 the United States. Despite its short duration (which roughly corresponds to the amount of time needed to play a hand in bridge), Barber reveals a score that it is atonce strolling, preoccupied, and dark.
Common of the composer’s work, there is a high level of craftsmanship and artistry, creating an atmosphere thatmanages to blend malaise, boredom, lust, and longing. This guide will clarify Barber’s score and walk through the piecefrom start to finish.
Speaking of walking through the piece, Barber’s work opens with meandering, jazz- inflected piano material 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 composedalmost objectively from Barber’s perspective: it is regular, clinical, unfeeling, even antiseptic. From here forward, I will refer to this opening material as the “gameplay music.” It becomes the structural anchor of the entire piece, returning throughout to provide transitions. Now we meet the four characters as they begin to play their hand. They are, in the order we first 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 from her or his internal monologue. The othercharacters, of course, do not hear these individual expressions; like a dramatic soliloquy, these ariettas allow the audience to peer inside the characters’ minds. At this early point, we already have the structural plan of Barber and Menotti’s work in hand: the gameplay music plus four ariettas, one for each character. Throw in some transitions alongthe way and the bones are in place. Naturally, that is a purposefully oversimplified sketch that dispenses with the considerable nuance and finesse at work in the piece. To turn our attention in that loftier direction, we now move on to each of the ariettas in order, along with the transitional materials that connect them.
The first arietta belongs to Sally. Before it properly begins, we hear Sally complain that she is once again relegated to the role of “dummy.” In contract bridge, as the four characters here are playing, the players are grouped into two pairs. As the dummy, Sally has basically 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 potential double-entendre on the word “dummy.” Another is that Sally is subordinate to Bill, and that she has no agency. After Sally voices her complaint that she is “forever dummy,” Bill chides her to carry on with her role. Her arietta begins witha 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 more active and crisply urgent. Sally expresses her desire to buy a “hat ofpeacock 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 hat of peacock feathers is the one. Here we find an example of Barber’s many musical objects that are peppered throughout the score. Note that whenever Sally sings the line, “I want to buy that hat ofpeacock feathers,” or similar variants thereof, the melody comprises only two or three distinct pitches; this construction is very chant-like, with many syllables sung on repeated pitches. This communicates Sally’s obsessive desire for the hat. Her arietta ends by returning to the game, telling Bill to take his hands off the table. On cue, the flute plays a briefsnippet of the gameplay music, transitioning us into Bill’s monologue. This transition illustrates that the gameplay music represents, along with the card game itself, the mundane, the veneer of the present, and 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 musing on 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 this section, a juxtaposition that highlights the tension between Bill’s reality (sitting, bored, at a card game with his wife) and his desire (to be with Cymbaline). The waltzing flow of Bill’smelody represents another of Barber’s musical objects, this time by way of a genre reference. The waltz is a dancewith connotations of elegance and sophistication.
At the same time, Barber taps into an archetypal image of a couple in love, clad in their best dress and dancing the night away. Bill is head over heels for Cymbaline, already evidenced by the rising repetitions of her name. Barber’s music provides further depth, allowing the audience to feel that Bill has been swept off his feet. To that point, Bill’s ariettaends 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 card game. “You have trumped the Queen,” sings Sally.
The gameplay music returns in the piano, bass, and percussion before yielding to a monologue by Geraldine. She wonders why Bill seems so distracted, quickly deciding that he is surely not thinking of her; he “no longer seeks” herfoot under the table, hinting perhaps at past rendezvous. Nor is Bill thinking of Sally, the wife he is no longer interested in, his “discarded Queen.” (At this point we can ponder 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 fading. The music comes to rest. Over tranquilly pulsing string chords, Geraldine realizes “with deep feeling,” as Barber marks in the score, that only her mother could have loved her. But now it is nearly too late; her 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 whole piece, taking on the devotional air of a prayer,pleading with some higher power for more time. “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 once referred to as “white-note music” in works ofthe sacred repertoire; this connection could affirm the purity of Geraldine’s longing.
Analytical conjecture aside, there is a profound sadness in this music. Geraldine is a sympathetic character, bolstered by the fact that she is the only one of the four card players who reveals any remotely selfless thoughts. Barbara Heyman, a scholar specializing in Barber’s work, reports that Menotti modeled Geraldine after Barber’ssister, Sara, who had a difficult relationship with their mother.1
Barber leaves this emotional high point by bringing back a truncated version of Bill’s “Cymbaline” waltz with Sally’s“peacock feather” refrain superimposed. After just a few bars, this collapses abruptly into the gameplay music,setting the stage for David’s closing arietta. David opens by summarizing his current life: every day he works for Mr.
Pritchett, whom he envies and detests, while every night he plays bridge with Sally, Bill, and Geraldine. The music here is broad, static, and exotic, with references to a vaguely “Asian” sound. This complements Menotti’s libretto; David wishes he could be as rich as “the Aga Khan” or “a maharajah.” This is a particularly common type of musicalexoticism in twentieth century Western art music: the composer introduces some element of foreign-ness 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 active,with a jazz inflection not 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 desire to pursue “every known perversion,” specifically referencing a book by Havelock Ellis he keeps hidden in his library. Ellis was an Englisheugenicist that wrote about what he called “sexual deviations.” This connection would have made clear to contemporary audiences that David fantasized relationships beyond the heterosexual norm. Beyond all else, David voices a want for power, a desire to be feared. At that very moment, Geraldine’s plea of “do not die, Mother” floats in,temporarily disrupting David’s arrogant bombast. He relents, mourning that even if he were “rich as Morgan” he would still work for Mr. Pritchett 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.
1 Barbara B. Heyman, Samuel Barber: The Composer and His Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992),404.