If it is summer and I am in the country, I sit on an old stone porch and listen to the small talk of the trees. But last winter in the months before my husband died, when I grew tired of the sick room, the regimen of pills, the constant presence of the carers, I would rent a studio at the Opera Center of America and practice. Then I was working on two Samuel Barber songs: St. Ita's Vision and The Crucifixion.