Samuel Barber

In an age when invoking older musical styles was generally ironic, Samuel Barber was a true Romantic. He was a master of lyrical melody, and of tonal harmonies moving in accordance with traditional paradigms. A professionally trained baritone, he wrote many songs, but is best known for the orchestral works he composed in his twenties. His Adagio for Strings (1936) is one of a handful of pieces from the 20th century that have become popular classics, while his Violin Concerto of 1939 has been performed and recorded by many front-rank soloists.

Over time, his harmony became more complex, though still strongly rooted in tonality, and his music was less readily accepted by audiences. A wider harmonic range—and, later, a limited use of modernist procedures, such as twelve-tone serialism—expanded his expressive scope as, in the 1940s and 50s, he turned his attention to ballet (Medea suite, 1946) and opera (Vanessa, 1956–7). He was the natural choice when it came to creating a large-scale opera for the 1967 opening of the new Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center, but the work he produced, based on Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, was poorly received. 

Early Years: Family, Education, and Creative Beginnings

Barber was born into a prosperous and cultivated family in West Chester, Pennsylvania, where his father was a physician. His maternal aunt Louise Homer was a professional mezzo-soprano who became prominent at the Metropolitan Opera and was married to Sidney Homer—a composer, most notably of art songs. These two encouraged and mentored him, and by the age of nine he had firmly decided he would be a composer. In 1924 he was among the first class to the preparatory division of the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where he took classes in composition, piano, and voice while continuing his high school education in West Chester, 30 miles away. In 1928, he graduated from high school and became a full-time student at Curtis. His composition professor was Rosario Scalero, who guided him from songs and piano pieces—which he had been composing in abundance from the age of seven—to larger ensembles, including string quartet (Serenade, Op. 1, 1928) and orchestra. He also formed an attachment to his classmate Gian Carlo Menotti, who was to become his life partner for over 40 years.

He completed his education in 1933 but had to wait a year to graduate with the rest of his class. Meanwhile, he had begun to establish himself nationally with his setting of Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach for voice and string quartet (1931), of which his own recording was broadcast. Further successes followed. In 1933, the Overture to The School for Scandal, his debut orchestral composition, was given its first performance by the Philadelphia Orchestra. In 1935, he won the Rome Prize, which gained him two years in the Italian capital. There he composed his First Symphony, which was presented first in Rome in 1936 and then at the opening concert of the Salzburg Festival the following year. In 1938, the Adagio for Strings, arranged from the slow movement of his String Quartet (1936), was played for the first time, under Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony Orchestra in a radio concert.

Barber: Quartet for Strings, Op. 11

Middle Years: Widening Range

Barber’s music became more angular and astringent in the early 1940s. His Second Symphony (1944)—originally dedicated to the U.S. Army Air Forces, in which he had served—was a war symphony and caused him distress. He withdrew it, but after his death it was republished, performed, and recorded. Composed in the same year, his Capricorn Concerto, for flute, clarinet, trumpet, and string orchestra, showed him still capable of sprightliness. The work was named after a house (“Capricorn”) in the upstate New York town of Mount Kisco into which he and Menotti had moved in 1943.

A clutch of major works came in the late 1940s. He wrote the Medea suite for Martha Graham (who choreographed it for the ballet Cave of the Heart in 1947) and the Piano Sonata (1947–49) for Vladimir Horowitz. A four-movement composition closing with a syncopated fugue, the sonata was a major statement in the genre, by an American composer. However, the work that won the widest affection, second only to the Adagio, was Knoxville: Summer of 1915 (1947): a 15-minute lyric scene for soprano and orchestra, evoking the rural idyll of a time not so long past but gone forever. It was commissioned by the Met soprano Eleanor Steber and has been performed by countless vocalists since its premiere.

In the next decade Barber produced Hermit Songs (1953), a cycle drawing on early Irish monastic writings, and the cantata Prayers of Kierkegaard (1954), both of which were first sung by Leontyne Price. Summer Music for wind quintet—one of Barber’s most serene works—followed in 1956,  and then his first opera, Vanessa, in 1957. This was intended for a cast at the Met led by Sena Jurinac and Nicolai Gedda; but Jurinac fell ill, and the title role at the premiere (and for some while after) went to Steber. Menotti provided the Gothic-Romantic libretto, well-gauged for his companion. The opera won him his first Pulitzer Prize (the other was awarded to his Piano Concerto in 1963) and was taken by the Met to Salzburg. However, it fell out of the company’s repertory and only began to find a regular place in the roster of American operas towards the end of the century.

Barber: Summer Music for Flute, Oboe, Clarinet, Bassoon, and Horn, Op. 31

Later Years: A Grand Opera and its Aftermath

Barber had no more luck with his second opera for the Met, Antony and Cleopatra (1966), which he wrote for Price, a large cast of principals, chorus, and ballet. Lavishly produced, the work failed to meet its high expectations, and the experience led to a long period of depression and alcoholism—as well as the breakup of his partnership with Menotti. They remained friends, however, and Menotti revamped the libretto (originally by the opera’s first director, Franco Zeffirelli) for a revision staged at the Juilliard School in 1975. Otherwise, Barber achieved little more.

Watching and Listening

Most of Barber’s chamber works belong to his early period and were written for his classmates at the Curtis Institute, notably the Curtis Quartet. Dover Beach (1931)—his beautiful and evocative extended song for voice and string quartet—he wrote at the age of 21. The next year he composed his Cello Sonata for Orlando Cole, a cellist for the Curtis Quartet. It was for that group again that he wrote his String Quartet (1936), with its much-loved Adagio. From later years, the one outstanding work is his wind quintet Summer Music (1955).

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