Samuel Barber

Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings, transformed into an unmissable funeral moment, is like a tree hiding the forest of a protean, if not prolific, oeuvre. Born in West Chester, Pennsylvania, on March 9, 1910, Samuel Osmond Barber II received a musical education from his pianist mother and trained as a singer, following in the footsteps of his aunt, the famous lyric contralto Louise Homer, who would go on to a career at New York's Metropolitan Opera, while his uncle Sidney Homer, a composer of melodies, followed him throughout his training. Gifted for improvisation, he was a precocious composer, tempted by the piano and opera. As a student at Philadelphia's Curtis Institute of Music, he studied piano with Isabelle Vengerova, composition with Rosario Scalero and conducting with Fritz Reiner, not to mention singing with Emilio de Gorgoza. Despite his talent as a baritone, he turned to composition, embracing a wide stylistic range that took account of his contemporaries without adhering to any particular school, or even to the American idiom of his fellow composers. Seduced by post-romanticism, he used the orchestral colors of impressionism as well as the dissonant counterpoint and polytonality of his time. This eclecticism, coupled with his ability to produce refined melodies, is reflected in a modern body of work that is still too little known. His student years were marked by his relationship with the Italian Gian Carlo Menotti and his friendship with George Antheil, whom he met in Vienna during one of his European visits. Twice winner of the Bearns Prize, with a lost Violin Sonata and the symphonic overture based on Sheridan's The School for Scandal (1931), premiered by the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra, Barber returned to Europe, first to Turin and then to Vienna, where he made his conducting debut. Winner of the American Prix de Rome in 1937, he completed his one-movement Symphony No. 1, quickly adopted on both sides of the Atlantic and the first American work to be included in the Salzburg Festival program. His only String Quartet, Op. 11, dates from this period, the second movement of which is rearranged as an Adagio for strings. Premiered on November 5, 1938, by the NBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Arturo Toscanini, the work quickly became a concert and... funerals, from Roosevelt in 1945 to Princess Grace of Monaco in 1982, including those of Albert Einstein and J. F. Kennedy. Kennedy, but also for other occasions, from the ceremonies of the Olympic Games to the last night of the BBC Proms, or for cinema and television in Elephant Man, Platoon, Le Fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain, the series Outlander, Seinfeld, The Simpsons or South Park, the poignant piece with its slow crescendo unfortunately making Barber a "one hit wonder". It would be a pity to overlook the rest of the composer's output, who taught at the Curtis Institute from 1939 to 1942, before being drafted into the Air Force during the Second World War. He created commissioned works, such as the Commando March (1943); the Violin Concerto premiered by Albert Spalding under Eugene Ormandy conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1941; the Cello Concerto for soloist Raya Garbouzsova and the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Serge Koussevitzky in 1946, and Symphony No. 2, premiered by the same conductor and orchestra on March 3, 1944, with the task of using an electronic sound generator developed by the Bell telephone company to imitate the radio signals sent to pilots. Barber replaced this tool with a clarinet in his 1947 revision, before rejecting the work and destroying it in 1964, with the exception of the second movement, renamed Night Flight. After the war, the composer moved with Menotti to Mount Kisco, New York. The name of the house, Capricorn, is also that of the concerto for flute, oboe, trumpet and strings premiered in New York. He worked on the ballet The Serpent Heart for choreographer Martha Graham's company, brought to the stage under the new title Cave of the Heart in 1947, before it became the subject of the orchestral suite Medea (op. 23), revised as Medea's Meditation and Dance of Vengeance (1955). This modified version, premiered in New York by Dimitri Mitropoulos on February 2, 1956, was simplified to Medea's Dance of Vengeance shortly before the composer's death. Composed after a prose poem taken from James Agee's A Death in the Family, Knoxville: Summer of 1915 is a piece for voice and orchestra for soprano Eleanor Steber, nostalgically evoking the author's youthful memories of Tennessee, magnified by the lyricism of the score. In 1949, Barber saw his Piano Sonata, commissioned by Irving Berlin and Richard Rodgers for the League of Composers, premiered by Vladimir Horowitz, who made it a staple of his concerts. Over the next decade, Barber was invited to conduct his own works by international orchestras, notably in Germany. In 1953, he found in Leontyne Price a choice interpreter for his song cycle Hermit Songs (op. 29), based on anonymous poems by Irish monks between the 8th and 13th centuries. The following year, he entrusted the soprano with the orchestral cantata Prayers of Kierkegaard, one of his most religiously personal and musically contemporary pieces, before setting to work on the composition of his first opera Vanessa, based on a libretto by Menotti. Opus 32, inspired by Karen Blixen's Seven Gothic Tales, featured a strong cast including Eleanor Steber, Rosalind Elias, Regina Resnik and Nicolai Gedda at its premiere on January 15, 1958 at New York's Metropolitan Opera House, conducted by Dimitri Mitropoulos and directed by Cecil Beaton. The operatic work was very well received by critics and audiences alike, earning Barber his first Pulitzer Prize for music. This success not only led Barber to continue in this vein with the short one-act opera A Hand of Bridge, again with libretto by Menotti, premiered at Spoleto's Festival dei Due Mondi on June 17, 1959, but also brought him the Lincoln Center commission for Anthony and Cleopatra, with libretto by Franco Zeffirelli after Shakespeare's play. Scheduled for the inauguration of the new Metropolitan Opera on September 16, 1966, it turned out to be a total failure due to technical deficiencies, notably a malfunctioning turntable. The composer attempted to erase this bad memory with a revised version, with a libretto by Menotti, for a performance at the Juilliard School in New York on February 6, 1975. In the meantime, Samuel Barber consoled himself with a second Pulitzer Prize for one of his most accomplished works, his Piano Concerto, commissioned by Lincoln Center for the opening of New York's Philharmonic Hall on September 24, 1962, with John Browning as soloist, accompanied by the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Erich Leinsdorf. Depression and alcoholism reduced both his creativity and his productivity. After separating from Menotti, he spent his time between his New York home and a chalet in Santa Cristina Gherdëina, near Val Gardena in northeastern Italy. In 1967, he recycled his famous Adagio for an oft-repeated choral Agnus dei, succeeding Andromache's Farewell, for voice and orchestra (1963) and preceding the cantata The Lovers, for baritone, chorus and orchestra, on a text by Pablo Neruda (1971). The symphonicEssai n° 3, dating from 1978, was one of his last notable works, before regular hospitalizations for cancer treatment until his death on January 23, 1981, at the age of 70.