Tags: Classical Music Composition.
Hermit Songs is a cycle of ten songs for voice and piano by Samuel Barber. Written in 1953 on a grant from the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation it takes as its basis a collection of anonymous poems written by Irish monks and scholars from the 8th to the 13th centuries in translations by W. H. Auden Chester Kallman Howard Mumford Jones Kenneth Jackson and Sean O’Faolain.