Samuel Barber's "Solitary Hotel" and James Joyce's Ulysses

The two-time Pulitzer Prize winning composer Samuel Barber (1910-1981) had a longstanding fondness for James Joyce, whose poetry and prose he occasionally set to music for voice and piano. For one of these settings, "Solitary Hotel," the penultimate number from a late cycle of five songs, Despite and Still (1968), Barber adopted a passage from the so-called "Ithaca" episode in Ulysses, one in which Stephen Dedalus concocts a tale in response to Leopold Bloom's thoughts on "originality" and "success" in contemporary advertising. Barber ingeniously set the text, a central one in terms of the novel's exploration of modernism and modernity, as a tango in popular song form, thereby creating a metatextual parallel to the deeper implications of Stephen's story.