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Dover Beach (op. 41) John Simon
Composed March 1983
Poem by Matthew Arnold (1822-88)
Other composers who have set the poem include Samuel Barber, Dominick Argento and Ronald Corp.
The poem was first published in 1867.
The opening stanza presents a nightscape of the beach at Dover, in which visual and auditory images play significant roles. The beach is bare, with only a hint of humanity and a light that ‘gleams and is gone’. Stanza two, with its reference to Sophocles, who like the poet also heard the sea’s ‘eternal note of sadness’, brings home the sense of dogged fate. In the third stanza Arnold hears in the ebbing tide the withdrawing of ‘The Sea of Faith’ in what was becoming an increasingly industrialised world. The final stanza can be interpreted in different ways. In this setting it is treated as a futile response on the part of the poet to a world that has become a maze of confusion.
The nocturnal scene, the ever present sea, permeate this setting.
Recording: St George’s Singers (Cape Town) conducted by Barry Smith April 1984
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Cape Town
South Africa