Samuel Barber

Composer

• Born: March 9, 1910
• Birthplace: West Chester, Pennsylvania
• Died: January 23, 1981
• Place of death: New York, New York

American composer

Barber developed a style of musical composition that bridged the gap between nineteenth century Romanticism and twentieth century modernism.

Area of achievement Music

Early Life

Samuel Barber was the son of a physician and a pianist; his maternal aunt was the famed contralto Louise Homer. Barber’s family did not, however, particularly encourage his natural inclination toward music studies. They wanted him to be “an average American boy,” and for them this meant active participation in athletics, particularly football. Barber, however, was in no way average. In a letter he wrote as a schoolboy, Barber expressed to his mother his determination to become a composer, and begged to be allowed to pursue music studies.

Clearly, Barber’s family always recognized his talent, even though they did not want their son to subject himself to the uncertainties inherent in a career in music. Still, there was no way to hold back a prodigy, and the six-year-old Barber began piano studies with William Hatton Green, himself a former student of the Polish pianist and composer Theodor Leschetizky. These early studies firmly linked Barber to European Romanticism and would leave an indelible influence on his own distinctive style. By age ten, Barber had written the first act of an opera entitled “The Rose Tree.” No doubt it would have been completed had the family cook, who was also the librettist, not left the Barber household for another position. Several songs dating from the early 1920’s still survive, however, in the archives of the Chester County Historical Society, West Chester, Pennsylvania.

Obviously, there was potential even in his youthful works, for with the sponsorship of Harold Randolph, then director of the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, Maryland, Barber was accepted as a charter student at the then recently founded Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia in 1924. He attended Curtis for eight years, during the first two of which he remained as well in his local high school to complete graduation requirements in 1926. His diversified studies at Curtis were in themselves remarkable and included composition with Rosario Scalero, piano with Isabella Vengerova, and voice with Emilio deGogorza. (A recording of his early song based on Matthew Arnold’s poem “Dover Beach” was made with the Curtis String Quartet, Barber singing the tenor solo, on May 13, 1935. It was issued as a Victor 78 rpm, and is a collector’s item since it represents the only example of Barber as vocalist.)

Photographs of Barber, most taken from the mid-1930’s once his career had begun, show a young man who is at once patrician, elegant, and conservative, more like a prosperous businessman than a bohemian artist. His intelligent, piercing eyes and slightly aquiline nose remained his best features throughout his life and make the adjective “distinguished” entirely appropriate to describe Barber’s appearance, even as a very young man. Except for white hair, slightly receding in his later years, Barber kept this youthful appearance to the last years of his life. His diction was similarly impeccable, perhaps in part from his vocal training, with only a trace of English accent behind otherwise uninflected speech. Unlike many composers, Barber had the ability to discuss his own compositions with great critical insight. Several radio interviews survive as transcriptions from the original broadcasts, the majority from the mid-1960’s, the period following composition of his opera Antony and Cleopatra (1966).

Life’s Work

Major recognition of Barber’s talent came in 1928 when his Sonata for Violin and Piano won the Bearns Prize. This twelve-hundred-dollar award, substantial for the 1920’s, encouraged the young composer. Barber would win the Bearns Prize a second time in 1935, for his overture and incidental music for Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s play The School for Scandal (1777), by far a better-known composition, which has been recorded several times.

Barber’s friendship with fellow composer Gian Carlo Menotti began during their years as fellow students at Curtis. Though an unlikely musical association given the style of Menotti, which follows in the wake of Italian verismo, the two collaborated on several important projects. Menotti, for example, staged the revised version of Antony and Cleopatra in 1975, for the Juilliard Opera in New York, and again in 1983, at his Spoleto Festival in Italy and his Festival of Two Worlds in Charleston, South Carolina. These productions were a critical success and largely responsible for the opera’s increased acceptance. Barber and Menotti also shared a warm personal friendship as well as a home, Capricorn, at Mount Kisco, New York.

A European tour Barber took in 1932 was important for shaping his style as a composer. It was in the summer of that year that he completed the first movement and part of the scherzo of his Sonata for Violoncello and Piano, which won for him the American Academy’s Prix de Rome in 1935, as well as a Pulitzer Traveling Scholarship, also in 1935. These grants allowed Barber an academic year in residence at the American Academy in Rome (1935-1936) and provided a setting for the world premiere of his Symphony no. 1 (In One Movement), which was given by the Augusteo Orchestra, Bernardino Molinari conducting. Famed conductor Artur Rodzinski, leading the Cleveland Orchestra, gave the American premiere later in 1936 (it was revised in 1942).

Barber’s career was well under way by the mid-1930’s, fostered as well by Arturo Toscanini’s sponsorship. Barber had met Toscanini during the American Academy year. The maestro recalled his having conducted Barber’s aunt, Louise Homer, in Christoph Gluck’s Orfeo ed Eurydice (1762), and asked to see the young composer’s work. What Toscanini saw were drafts of his Essay no. 1, the first of his Essays for Orchestra, and the Adagio for Strings. He would conduct these celebrated pieces with the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) Symphony Orchestra on November 5, 1938. Both works have since become standards of the symphonic literature. Though the Essays for Orchestra received mixed critical response at the time of its premiere, the Adagio for Strings gained immediate public acceptance. Its affecting lyricism makes it appreciable on first hearing. This was the music that the NBC radio network chose to play immediately after its announcement of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death on April 12, 1945, and later it was adapted as part of the score for the motion picture The Elephant Man (1980). Barber would increasingly employ what he considered “literary” techniques in his compositions, and in his last years he would write other “essays,” so called because they developed architechtonically from an orchestral thesis.

Barber’s career continued to gain momentum in early 1941, when Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra gave the premiere of his Violin Concerto, op. 14, with Albert Spalding as soloist. Though when first composed Iso Briselli, for whom it was intended, called its final movement “unplayable” and refused to accept the piece, it has come to be highly regarded by musicians as a virtuoso work; indeed, the Philadelphia Orchestra singled it out for a cash award during its 1957-1958 season.

As was the case for many artists, World War II imposed severe limitations on Barber’s composing activities. He entered the Army in 1943 and served in a clerical position, though he did write his Commando March at this time. Though his name never publicly appeared as part of the controversy, it is generally known that the Army refused him permission to write a piece in honor of the Russian people. Protests on his behalf by his fellow artists, the best known of whom was the Metropolitan Opera’s Lawrence Tibbett, probably were responsible for Barber’s quiet transfer to the Air Force. It was at this time that Barber composed his first version of Symphony no. 2, a programmatic work that contained attempts to reproduce electronically the sounds and machinery of flight. Barber was never pleased with the work, and after several attempts to revise it by eliminating all programmatic material, he saw to the destruction of all remaining undistributed published copies and withdrew the title from his catalog of works.

Barber, unlike many composers, rarely conducted or taught. He had studied conducting in the 1930’s under Fritz Reiner, but Reiner considered Barber mediocre, and this opinion seems to have discouraged the young composer. Barber did conduct in later life, but only when his reputation was needed to publicize one of his compositions. For example, his Cello Concerto (1945), though critically acclaimed, was recorded in 1950 only because Barber himself agreed to conduct the orchestra. Barber’s teaching was limited to a brief period at Curtis immediately after graduation from that institution. He never gave master classes.

The years following the war were especially productive. On a commission from the American soprano Eleanor Steber, Barber wrote his immensely popular Knoxville: Summer of 1915, op. 24, based on the autobiographical memoir by James Agee. This work premiered April 9, 1948, with Serge Koussevitzky conducting Steber and the Boston Symphony. Here again, as he had in the Adagio for Strings and the first Essays for Orchestra, Barber showed his gift for lyricism and his affinity for literature. Indeed, the works of Barber that have these qualities are inevitably those that have remained audience favorites. The Hermit Songs (1952-1953), based on medieval Irish texts, are similarly popular. They premiered on October 30, 1953, at the Library of Congress, sung by Leontyne Price, who was just beginning her career, with Barber playing the piano accompaniment.

His success in vocal writing led to the opera Vanessa. This work, with libretto by Menotti, was given to popular acclaim but mixed critical reaction at the Metropolitan Opera Company with Steber in the title role on January 15, 1958. It did, however, win a Pulitzer Prize, and its audience popularity in several revivals led the Metropolitan Opera Company to commission Antony and Cleopatra for the September 16, 1966, inauguration of its new house at Lincoln Center. One problem with this work in its original form is that it was written as much to illustrate the new theater’s performance capabilities as to present the composer’s music. The Franco Zeffirelli production was especially lavish, and the difficult music, combined with what Barber himself believed was an inappropriate production, resulted in what is generally considered a failure, though Price, the Cleopatra of the premiere, always defended the music and kept Cleopatra’s death music in her concert programs. It remains a bitter irony that the costumes for Vanessa, Antony and Cleopatra, and thirty-nine other Metropolitan Opera Company productions were destroyed in a warehouse fire on November 7, 1974.

Depression set in for Barber after the failure of Antony and Cleopatra. He sold his Mount Kisco home and set about revising the opera. Its revised version runs almost a full hour less than the original, and it was given with some success by the Juilliard School in 1975, with still more subsequently by Menotti at Charleston and Spoleto.

Barber’s last years were plagued by hospitalization and treatment for cancer, and this affected his work. An eight-minute piece for oboe and string orchestra, written in 1978, is his last known composition. Though originally designed as part of an oboe concerto, it was given in late 1981 as Canzonetta by the New York Philharmonic, Zubin Mehta conducting, with Harold Gomberg as soloist.

Significance

It is difficult to say exactly what legacy Barber has left American music. What is clear is that he was an immensely gifted composer whose gentle, lyrical style and precision allowed many members of the general audience an introduction to modern music that they would not otherwise have had. Barber could have used his gifts to pander to audience tastes. Though this would have assured him at least short-term popularity, he refused to do so.

His greatest accomplishment was his ability to use familiar nineteenth century Romantic musical forms in undeniably modern ways. To his last days, he rejected both extreme dissonance and stripped-down minimalism. His music was almost never “American-sounding” in the manner of George Gershwin or Aaron Copland, yet he ranks with them as one of the most often performed and recorded American composers of the twentieth century.

Bibliography

Ardoin, John. “Samuel Barber at Capricorn.” Musical America 80 (March, 1960): 4-5. An intimate portrait of the composer’s private life at the house in Mount Kisco, New York, which he shared with Menotti until 1974. Barber found inspiration in the landscape and through his association with his fellow composer and longtime friend.

Broder, Nathan. “The Music of Samuel Barber.” Musical Quarterly 34 (July, 1948): 325-335. Though Barber based many orchestral compositions on the classical sonata form, he managed to do so without slavish adherence to the past. This article illustrates Barber’s ability to introduce new techniques within more traditional structures.

Demuth, Norman. Musical Trends in the Twentieth Century. London: Rockliff, 1952. Compares Barber’s virtuosity to that of Richard Strauss; even so, Barber’s music is not neoclassical but represents a Romanticism appropriate to the twentieth century.

Dexter, Harry. “Samuel Barber and His Music.” Parts 1, 2. Musical Opinion 72 (March/April, 1949): 285-286, 343-344. A two-part article that provides good criticism of Barber’s style: his emotional control and the depth of feeling that he produces in spite of this control.

Felsenfeld, David. Britten and Barber: Their Lives and Their Music. Pompton Plains, N.J.: Amadeus Press, 2005. Includes a brief biography, essays about Barber and composer Benjamin Britten, and analyses of four of Barber’s compositions recorded on an accompanying compact disc.

Friedewald, Russell Edward. A Formal and Stylistic Analysis of the Published Music of Samuel Barber. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1957. A dissertation that distinguishes between Barber’s music composed before and after 1939, noting the technical enrichment of the later work and Barber’s adaptations of the classical sonata form.

Hennessee, Don A. Samuel Barber: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985. Contains a brief biographical essay as well as a catalog of Barber’s works and critical works available on them.

“Obituary: Mr. Samuel Barber.” The Times (London), January 26, 1981: 14. A lengthy obituary that discusses Barber’s career and sees him in the tradition of Romanticism as lyrical rather than neoclassical or experimental, generally rejecting many of the trends of modern music.

Simmons, Walter. Voices in the Wilderness: Six American Neo-Romantic Composers. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2004. Provides a biographical overview and analysis of Barber’s compositions, including an assessment of his strengths and weaknesses and affinities with other composers.

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