Knoxville: Summer of 1915. The autobiographical story of James Agee that inspired Samuel Barber

As part of the Prague Spring 2026 Debut, Samuel Barber’s charming composition for soprano and orchestra, based on a text by American writer and journalist James Agee, will be performed.

Writer and journalist James Agee was born on November 27, 1909, in Knoxville, Tennessee. After studying at Harvard, he became a film critic for Fortune magazine and also wrote for The Nation monthly and Time weekly magazines. A close friend of Charlie Chaplin, he collaborated on the screenplays for The African Queen with Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn (1951) and The Night of the Hunter (1955). His most famous novel, A Death in the Family, was not published until 1957, after his untimely death (he died suddenly of a heart attack in a New York taxi in 1955). In 1958, he won the Pulitzer Prize for this novel.

James Agee’s life was deeply marked by his father’s fatal car accident in 1916. It was these memories that influenced his 1938 essay Knoxville: Summer of 1915, which became the basis for Samuel Barber’s composition. “We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child,” Agee commented on the text. The composition was premiered in 1948 by the Boston Symphony Orchestra with soloist Eleanor Steber, conducted by Serge Koussevitzky.

“May God bless my people, my uncle,
my aunt, my mother, my good father,
oh, remember them kindly in their time of trouble;
and in the hour of their taking away.
After a little I am taken in and put to bed.
Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her:
and those receive me, who quietly treat me,
as one familiar and well-beloved in that home:
but will not, no, will not, not now, not ever;
but will not ever tell me who I am.”