Robert Stern

Contralto and Piano

Editor's Note:

Carl Sandburg (1878–1967), born in Galesburg, Illinois, and died in Flat Rock, North Carolina, was a Pulitzer Prize–winning poet and one of the defining voices of twentieth‑century American verse. "Fog" comes from his breakthrough collection Chicago Poems (1916), now in the public domain. In just six lines it became one of the most anthologized poems in American literature — a perfect miniature of Imagism, the movement, indebted to Japanese haiku, that prizes a single clear image held in stillness.

Robert Stern set these lines as an eighteen‑year‑old freshman at the Eastman School of Music, signing the manuscript "Rochester, 1952." His composition teachers there included Bernard Rogers, Louis Mennini, Wayne Barlow, and the school's director, Howard Hanson. Fog is believed to be only the third composition Stern ever wrote — following A Short Fantasy for Piano and A Prayer, both written in 1950 — and is likely to be the earliest of his works to appear in published form. It is a miniature to match its subject: just sixteen bars for contralto and piano, folling a single page in Stern's original manuscript.

New August 2026 edition of 1952 original manuscript courtesy of Michael Golzmane.