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 The long and distinguished tradition of Western art music took a while to take root in the United States. That is not to say, however, that there hasn't been an audience: indeed, the first American colonists brought with them a taste for the music of the great European masters. Yet it seems that until very recently, we were unable to convince the world at large that we are capable of producing masters of our own. One of the very first of our native sons to be accepted internationally as a master composer was Samuel Barber. While generally considered to be among the most conservative composers of the 20th century, Barber's music is widely loved and listened to by a broad and diverse audience that does not often realize who or what it is they are listening to. In addition to being America's most critically recognized composer of contemporary vocal music, Barber's Adagio for Strings has proven to be one of the most beloved and popular works in the history of Western art music.
Samuel Osborne Barber II was born on March 9, 1910 in West Chester, Pennsylvania, to Samuel Le Roy and Marguerite Barber (the boy was named for his paternal grandfather). Samuel Le Roy was a doctor and a prominent citizen of West Chester, and served as president of the local school board. There were no musicians on his side of the family, but his mother's side had plenty: one of Marguerite's sisters, Louise, was married to a composer by the name of Sidney Homer, a somewhat significant composer of song who would be an important mentor to the younger composer. Louise Homer herself was a contralto who achieved real success as an operatic and oratorio singer, including a healthy career at the Metropolitan Opera.
Sam began his musical training on the piano at age six, but his parents had no interest in producing a musical prodigy, and instead encouraged the boy to play baseball, football, etc. But Sam was very insistent about his budding musical training, and with his piano lessons established, he took up composition soon after, certain from the start that this would be his life's work. The boy was ambitious, and had completed an opera by age 10. It was called The Rose Tree, and had parts written for himself and his sister Sara to sing, and even included a Gypsy chorus.
Barber received his first paying job as a musician in 1924, when he was 14, as organist for a local church. However, he was not able to hold on to it for very long: he was unwilling to play unwritten fermatas (musical pauses) during the hymns, making it very difficult for the congregation to keep up. In that same year, the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia was scheduled to open its doors for the first time, and Barber applied for entrance. He was accepted, and there became a charter student. Sam had not yet graduated from high school at the tender age of 14, but his father, through his position on the school board, made it possible for Sam to continue to attend high school and Curtis at the same time: he made a rule which stated that if a high school student was a composer, then they could take Fridays off to attend concerts of the Philadelphia Orchestra. Thus began Samuel Barber's association with the Curtis Institute, a relationship that would prove absolutely essential to his development as a musician of the highest order.
Barber's initial focus of study at Curtis was piano performance, studying first with George Boyle, and later with Isabelle Vengerova. In his second year, Sam added composition studies to his curriculum, under the tutelage of Rosario Scalero, an Italian composer who was also a violinist. In his third year, he took up the study of vocal performance with Emilio de Gogorza, accruing with that measure a grand total of three concurrent majors, a first at Curtis. Barber juggled all this, on top of a schedule already packed with such "subsidiary" coursework as conducting, music theory, German, Italian and French. Sam showed a considerable knack for foreign languages, and it is perhaps for this reason that Scalero entrusted to Barber's fellowship a young student fresh from Italy named Gian-Carlo Menotti, who arrived on the doorstep of the Institute in 1928. Menotti spoke no English, but knew French, and Barber was excelling at French, so the two were able to communicate. The friendship that was built there was to last until Barber's death in 1981. They traveled together, lived together, composed together, and it is widely assumed that they slept together, although that was never confirmed by Barber, and has yet to be publicly confirmed by Menotti (although among his fellow artists, Menotti has a reputation for being very loose-lipped about the subject). Stories have been told and allegations have been made by many notable and informed third parties, but they are casual and easily disregarded. However, neither man ever married, and they were inseparable for nearly 53 years.
Beginning in 1928, Barber spent several consecutive summers in Europe. His composition teacher spent his summers at the Scalero family home in Gressoney, a small city in northern Italy, which gave Sam a proper excuse to go. In addition to spending a fair amount of time in Gressoney with his teacher, Barber toured Germany, Austria, Hungary and France, and absorbed as much European culture as he could, attending operas, plays, ballets, etc., and practicing his language studies. He made the first trip with a schoolmate named David Freed, and went with Menotti every time after that. Menotti's companionship afforded cost-free living accommodations at the Menotti villa in Cadegliano, Italy. Barber's experiences in Europe were indispensable, for they helped to give him perhaps more of an international sensibility than would otherwise be afforded him had he stayed in America.
Barber's earliest work that he deemed worthy of an opus number was a song called The Daisies (1927), but it was actually designated Op. 2 No. 1. The "prestigious" position of Op. 1 was assigned to his Serenade for String Quartet or String Orchestra (1929). With regards to Op. 2, the third of the three songs, Bessie Bobtail, was composed much later, between Music for a Scene from Shelley Op. 7 (1933), and The Virgin Martyrs, for 4-part women's chorus Op. 8 No. 1 (1935). At any rate, perhaps the most consequential work of this period (up to Op. 11) is Dover Beach Op. 3, for baritone voice and string quartet, completed in the winter of 1931 at Curtis. As early as this, Barber's lyrical, melodic style of composition was already apparent. Barber composed many more works than these during this period, but he must have felt that many of them would misrepresent him, so they were disregarded and/or destroyed. Among those rejected works was a violin sonata that had won a $1200 purse for him in a competition.
Barber left the halls of the Curtis Institute in 1933, and spent that winter at Cadegliano with Menotti. It was during this time that the two young men met Arturo Toscanini, who would later help Barber's career immensely by conducting the premiere of two of his works. These performances helped Barber's international reputation more than anything else could have. By now, any notions of becoming a great operatic baritone were gone, and he was settled in his "niche" as a composer (one who could also play and conduct his own work, of course: such was the case with many of the old masters, including Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Liszt, Mahler, and at least one contemporary, Benjamin Britten).
Barber's String Quartet Op. 11 was most significant not for its own merits as a whole, but for its second movement, which was extracted by Barber to create the most celebrated work of his career, the famous Adagio for Strings. Barber arranged the Adagio in 1937 specifically for Toscanini, who was looking for American works to perform at an upcoming engagement with the NBC Symphony Orchestra in New York City. Toscanini performed it with the NBC on November 5, 1938, along with another work by Barber, his Essay for Orchestra Op. 12. The success of the two works, especially the Adagio, catapulted Barber into the international limelight.
Regardless of his own perception of the acceptance of the Adagio and other works, Barber was considered a conservative composer among his contemporaries, and that label was to be applied to his work throughout his career. Although many of the composers of his generation would go on to consider this label a vilification, Barber had no compunctions about musical conservatism, and Barber made no sacrifice of his own unique vision to appease the modernists that served to put pressure on his aesthetic. This "rebellious" adhesion to the musical language of the composers of the past is still criticized to this day.
WWII did not immediately affect Samuel Barber's life: he returned to Curtis for a time to conduct a small chorus and teach orchestration. But in 1943, he was drafted into the Army as a result of U.S. involvement in the war. After basic training he was assigned to Special Services (his eyesight was poor), and ultimately was asked to compose an original work for the war effort. The result, Commando March, was not given an opus number, but it was later published. He was discharged from the Army in September of 1945.
Barber was now free to live and prosper as a composer. He went to live at an estate that he and Menotti had purchased in 1943, called Capricorn, which was located near Mt. Kisco in New York. He was receiving commissions by the cartload by now, and had his choice of them. Most every work of this period was a commission, including the Concerto for Violoncello and Orchestra Op. 22 (commissioned for Raya Garbousova), a ballet entitled Medea Op. 23 (commissioned for Martha Graham), and Knoxville: Summer of 1915 Op. 24, which was commissioned and premiered by soprano Eleanor Steber.
After a few years of steady composition, Barber took more interest in conducting, and fortunately he found no shortage of opportunities. In 1950 London Gramophone approached him with an offer to record 3 of his orchestral works, with him as conductor. He arranged to have a rehearsal orchestra in Denmark, and hired a conducting coach, Nicolai Malko, to come along. After this rehearsal period he went to London, and recorded his Symphony No. 2 Op. 19, his Concerto for Violoncello and Orchestra, and Medea, in 4 days. Soon after the recordings were made, he conducted a similar program of his works in Frankfurt and Berlin. All this from a man who was told, while a student at Curtis, that he would never amount to anything as a conductor.
Barber was offered commissions to write a serious opera as early as 1942, but he always turned them down, maintaining that though he wanted to write an opera, he could not do so without a libretto (text) that inspired him. He talked to several eminent literary figures over the years in his quest for a good libretto, including Thornton Wilder, Dylan Thomas, and James Agee, the author of the text Barber had used for Knoxville: Summer of 1915, but to no avail. Meanwhile, Menotti was enjoying his own blooming career as a composer of opera, gaining wide international acclaim with premieres at the Met (Amelia Goes to the Ball, 1938), and at La Scala in Italy (The Consul, 1951). It seems obvious with the benefit of hindsight that the two men would have come upon the idea of collaboration easily, but the two approached the notion slowly, and not without trepidation. They proceeded by submitting their work to each other scene by scene, line by line. This process took six years, from 1952 to 1957. The premiere of Vanessa Op. 32 took place on January 28th, 1958, at the Metropolitan Opera. It was an outrageous success. It was lauded by the paying public and the critics alike, and it won for Samuel Barber his first Pulitzer Prize. The work was a culmination of all of Barber's skill and intuition as a composer, and the payoff was glorious.
In 1959, Barber's publishing house, G. Schirmer, asked Barber to write a piano concerto in honor of that house's 100th anniversary, to be performed during the inaugural ceremonies for the new Philharmonic Hall at Lincoln Center, to take place three years later in 1962. The pianist who was to perform the work was John Browning, and Barber spent substantial time with him, in order to tailor the piano part to suit the performer. He had begun the work by March 1960, but did not finish the final movement until two weeks before the premiere, leaving Browning very little time to prepare the work. Nevertheless, the performance brought the house down, and Barber had yet another hit on his hands. This is widely considered to be the highpoint of Barber's career: the Concerto won Barber his 2nd Pulitzer Prize, and was hailed as an instant classic.
Barber's next world-scale commission was to be a new opera, for the opening night of the new home of the Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center, in 1966. Barber did not commit to the project until 1964, leaving him only two years to complete the opera (Vanessa had taken him five). The project was doomed before it had even begun. The story was to be after Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, to be co-written by the composer and Franco Zeffirelli, who would also direct and produce the work at the new house. Zeffirelli conceived the work as a grand spectacle, planning seemingly endless physical trappings that seemed to suit the new Metropolitan's vast wingspace and technical potential. This conception did not quite gel with Barber's notion of how the work should be presented, but by that point, the composer had little to no control over the final product.
Although Barber could hardly be blamed for the resulting spectacle, it certainly seems in hindsight that he bears responsibility for a substantial share of the shame over the whole thing. Every conceivable problem that a grand opera could have on an opening night happened at that premiere: props were lost, costumes ruined, light cues missed, musical entrances forgotten, ad infinitum. While the music was beautiful, there would be no easy recovery for Barber after this humiliation. The debate over Barber's actual involvement in this calamity exists to this day, but there is little doubt as to Barber's reaction to the perceived debacle: he was a sensitive artist, by then accustomed to success, and a world-scale calamity such as this must have instilled a new and terrible apprehension.
It is widely believed that the failure of Antony and Cleopatra contributed to Barber's subsequent drinking problem, but the matter is difficult to confirm: when exactly it was that Barber began drinking could only be an imprecise estimate. At any rate, Barber's health began to fail in his later years as a result of his drinking and recurring depression. He remained active as a composer, but his low spirits affected his work. For the next 15 years he accepted very few commissions, and concentrated on pieces that he really wanted to write, which consisted mostly of vocal works, but also included works for different solo instruments, and a Third Essay for Orchestra Op. 47. Samuel Barber died of cancer on January 23rd, 1981, less than two months before his 71st birthday.
The most frequent criticism paid to Samuel Barber as a composer is that his music was too traditional and conservative. This criticism was especially relevant in the latter half of Barber's career, when composers like John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez were all the rage. Amidst the rigors of the capricious world of 20th Century art music, Barber remained true to himself, always refining his own style, his own voice, and never succumbing to the latest fashions. In his lifetime, he suffered for it, but long after most of the music of this century is forgotten, at least one of Barber's works, the Adagio for Strings, will be remembered. Hopefully, so will the man who wrote it.
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