Barber: String Quartet

One part of Samuel Barber's String Quartet has vastly outgrown the rest in popularity: the slow movement, which is widely known, especially in the composer’s arrangement for string orchestra, as “Barber’s Adagio,” or simply Adagio for Strings. This movement has often been played on solemn occasions, such as memorials and funerals. In the context of the whole quartet, however, it speaks more of intimacy and respite from turmoil. These qualities are only magnified by the scoring for string quartet, which is light when compared to the grander atmosphere of the orchestral version

Introduction

Following tradition, the String Quartet begins with a movement in sonata form. (Not following tradition, the quartet is in three movements instead of four.) Then comes the "Molto adagio." Barber was aware of this movement’s power as soon as he composed it. On September 19, 1936, he wrote to cellist Orlando Cole of the Curtis String Quartet (Barber’s intended ensemble for the work’s premiere): “I have just finished the slow movement of my quartet today—it is a knockout! Now for a Finale." That closing movement, however, gave him trouble. He scrapped one version before the premiere, and another after. Not until 1942 did he find a solution that satisfied him.

History

Barber’s official output begins with a piece for string quartet—his ten-minute Serenade, Op. 1, in three short movements, which he wrote in 1928, when he was 18. Another followed in 1931: a setting of Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach for baritone and string quartet. Both these works date from his time as a student at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, and both were brought to Europe in 1935 by the Curtis String Quartet (classmates of his). They commissioned him to compose a full-scale string quartet for their second European tour, in 1936–37. He worked on this while himself in Europe (1935–36), but did not make the deadline, probably because he was concentrating on his First Symphony (in One Movement). It was therefore the Pro Arte Quartet that gave the first performance, on December 14, 1936, in Rome. The final, definitive version received its premiere at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., on May 28, 1943, played by the Hungarian (Waldbaeuer-Kerpely) Quartet. Barber dedicated the score to his aunt and uncle, Louise and Sidney Homer, who had mentored him as a boy and were themselves professional musicians—the former a contralto with a notable career at the Metropolitan Opera, the latter a song composer.

Barber: Quartet for Strings, Op. 11

Form

The opening sonata-form movement has a fierce, minor-key first theme, mounting at speed to a surprise major chord. Following tradition, the second theme is altogether calmer. It has two elements: a harmonized melody with the character of a hymn and a melodic contour that wanders up and down through large intervals. Again in keeping with tradition, there is a development section followed by a recapitulation. The second-movement adagio moves down a half step from the key of the previous movement—from B minor to B-flat minor. Its overlapping waves reach a high climax and relapse to their starting point. A very short finale takes us back to the first movement, leaving its ferocity unabated.

Analysis

The work makes a strong entrance, with a melody that rises through decisive steps played in unison and forte (loud) under the marking "Molto allegro e appassionato" (“Very fast and passionate”). At the summit, the four players burst into harmony with a glowing D-major chord, which is immediately undercut by a non-chord tone. The three-note “step” motive opening the movement—the second note down a half step from the first, the third up a whole step from the second—is developed as the music winds towards a repeat of the opening, which this time lands on a G-major chord. The tempo then slackens for two slower themes: the first hymnlike, the second wandering.

This leads to another return of the opening, which now launches the development section. At first, it draws heavily on the step motive, but we soon hear transformations of the hymn and the wandering theme—the latter in harmony with a warm melody beneath, on cello then viola. Buzzing repetitions of the step motive prepare for the recapitulation, which is initially exact, but then includes deviations. The hymn is fully present, but there is only a trace of the wandering theme before the end.

Here the celebrated adagio takes over. This seems to take us to another world, yet its theme rises, just as in the first movement, by repeating steps in gradual ascent to a point of consonant rest. The melody comes down in a scale, only to rise again, and these slow undulations continue in one instrument after another. Around halfway through, the first violin falls silent, and the melodic drive of the music falls to the cello, heading a low trio. The music is marked “with increasing intensity,” and the first violin returns. Climbing higher, it carries its lower companions to a moment of consummation, which is followed by a reprise of the movement’s opening and a transition to an F-major chord signalling a return to B-flat minor.

What we as listeners may not expect is a return to the first movement—its impulsive start and its wandering melody. A fast finish leaves the agitation not resolved, but intensified.

Connections

Barber’s String Quartet is contemporaneous with the Viennese atonal composer Arnold Schoenberg’s Fourth String Quartet (1936) but is musically worlds apart. Brought up in a conservative climate fostered first by the Homers and then by Curtis, Barber was thoroughly at home in a style that proceeded from the Romantics without passing through the crises of modernism. Comparisons may be made with the music of English composer William Walton (1902–83), or of Soviet composer Aram Khachaturian (1903–78). As in those cases, Barber’s music from the 1930s speaks of its time in its unsettled, unsettling harmonies and its irregularities of form. Modernism may be over the horizon, but it is not ignored.

Legacy

It is the adagio that has most widely and deeply embedded itself in culture—especially the composer’s arrangement for string orchestra. (Barber also made a choral adaptation to the “Agnus Dei” text and approved a version for organ.) Scored for the usual five string sections (including double basses), the music has an added richness and splendor, which are amplified when the orchestra splits into nine parts at the climax of the movement. It was first performed in this version on November 5, 1938, by Arturo Toscanini in a live broadcast from New York. Among many subsequent uses at memorials, it was inserted by the conductor Leonard Bernstein into his New York Philharmonic program following Barber’s death in 1981. The adagio’s aura of melancholy—ennobled, even triumphant—has brought it often to soundtracks, perhaps most notably for Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986). In a different vein, it has also proven a usefully familiar backdrop for EDM artists, such as the Dutch DJs Ferry Costen and Tiësto.

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Article by Paul Griffiths