Samuel Barber

Samuel Osborne Barber II was born on March 9, 1910, in West Chester, Pennsylvania, a county seat west of Philadelphia. His father, Samuel Le Roy Barber, practiced medicine, and his mother, Marguerite Beatty Barber, played the piano. Music ran deeper on the maternal side: his aunt, Louise Homer, sang leading contralto roles at the Metropolitan Opera, and her husband, Sidney Homer, composed art songs that Barber knew from childhood ^[1]. Any account of who was Samuel Barber has to begin with this family circle, because it gave the boy both a working model of a professional musical life and a lifelong attachment to the singing voice.

Barber began piano lessons at six and tried his hand at composition at seven. At nine, in a note left for his mother, he announced that he was meant to be a composer and asked her not to push him toward the athletic pastimes expected of boys in his town ^[1]. He served for a time as organist at a church in Westtown, near West Chester, while still in his early teens.

In 1924, at fourteen, he entered the newly founded Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia as a member of its first class. He studied piano with Isabelle Vengerova, composition with Rosario Scalero, and voice with Emilio de Gogorza, an unusually broad training that left him a capable baritone as well as a composer ^[2]. At Curtis he met a fellow student, the Italian-born composer Gian Carlo Menotti, who became his closest companion for most of his life.

Recognition came quickly. Barber's setting of Matthew Arnold's poem Dover Beach, composed in 1931 for voice and string quartet, showed his gift for long vocal lines; he later recorded the work himself as the singer, a document that survives as evidence of his trained baritone ^[2]. The overture to The School for Scandal, written while he was still a student, won the Bearns Prize from Columbia University and received its premiere by the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1933 ^[1].

Two awards of the American Prix de Rome and a Pulitzer traveling scholarship in the mid 1930s allowed him extended stays in Europe, where he composed his Symphony in One Movement. In 1937 Artur Rodzinski conducted that symphony at the Salzburg Festival, the first work by an American composer performed there ^[3].

The decisive event came on November 5, 1938, when Arturo Toscanini led the NBC Symphony Orchestra in the premieres of Barber's first Essay for Orchestra and the Adagio for Strings, an arrangement of the slow movement of his String Quartet, Op. 11 ^[3]. Toscanini rarely programmed new American music, and his endorsement carried enormous weight. The Adagio, with its single arching melody rising to a climax and falling away into silence, soon acquired a public life few concert works ever achieve. It was played after the deaths of Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy and later reached new audiences through Oliver Stone's 1986 film Platoon ^[4].

Barber taught briefly at Curtis before joining the Army Air Forces in 1942 during the Second World War. The service commissioned his Second Symphony, which he revised after the war and eventually withdrew, destroying much of the score, though the work was later reconstructed from surviving parts ^[2]. A more durable wartime product was the Capricorn Concerto, named for Capricorn, the house above Mount Kisco, New York, that he and Menotti bought in 1943 and shared for three decades ^[1].

The years after 1945 produced some of the most performed items in the catalogue of Samuel Barber achievements. Knoxville: Summer of 1915, a setting for soprano and orchestra of a prose text by James Agee, was written for the soprano Eleanor Steber and first performed with the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Serge Koussevitzky in 1948 ^[5]. The Cello Concerto won the New York Music Critics' Circle Award. His Piano Sonata, commissioned for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the League of Composers, was premiered by Vladimir Horowitz in 1949 and quickly entered the recital repertoire, a rare fate for a mid-century American sonata ^[3].

Through these years Barber also kept writing songs, the genre closest to his upbringing. The Hermit Songs of 1953, settings of medieval Irish texts, were introduced by a young Leontyne Price with the composer at the piano, beginning a long association between the two ^[5].

Opera brought Barber his first Pulitzer Prize. Vanessa, with a libretto by Menotti, opened at the Metropolitan Opera on January 15, 1958, conducted by Dimitri Mitropoulos, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Music that year ^[6]. Set in a northern country house and concerned with two women waiting on the same faithless man, the opera traveled to the Salzburg Festival in 1958, another first for an American work.

A second Pulitzer followed in 1963 for the Piano Concerto, commissioned by the music publisher G. Schirmer for its centennial and premiered by John Browning with Erich Leinsdorf and the Boston Symphony at the opening festivities of Philharmonic Hall at Lincoln Center in September 1962 ^[3]. The concerto's blend of virtuoso brilliance and lyric slow movement made it one of the few American piano concertos to hold a place in the international repertoire.

Among basic Samuel Barber facts, the two Pulitzers sit alongside a body of orchestral and vocal music that conductors and singers never abandoned: the Violin Concerto of 1939, whose finale's difficulty prompted a famous dispute with its original commissioner; the ballet Medea, written for Martha Graham; the Prayers of Kierkegaard for chorus and orchestra; and three Essays for Orchestra spread across his career ^[2]. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and received two Guggenheim Fellowships, honors that confirmed his standing at the center of American musical life ^[1].

Barber's partnership with Gian Carlo Menotti was the anchor of his private world. The two met as teenagers at Curtis in the late 1920s and lived together at Capricorn from 1943 until the house was sold in the early 1970s ^[1]. Menotti, himself a successful opera composer, wrote the librettos for Vanessa and for the short chamber opera A Hand of Bridge. The relationship, romantic for many years and companionable after, was an open fact among musicians at a time when such things were rarely acknowledged in print.

Friends described Barber as witty, well read, and demanding of himself. He spoke several languages, chose his song texts from poets ranging from James Joyce to Rainer Maria Rilke, and revised scores obsessively, sometimes withdrawing pieces that failed to satisfy him ^[2]. He never held a long-term teaching post after leaving Curtis, living instead on commissions, royalties, and prizes, an independence few American composers of his generation managed.

He struggled with depression and, in his later decades, with alcohol, difficulties that biographers link to the reception of his last opera and to the loss of Capricorn, which he mourned for the rest of his life ^[1].

The commission for the opening of the new Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center went to Barber, and Antony and Cleopatra, staged by Franco Zeffirelli with Leontyne Price as Cleopatra, opened the house on September 16, 1966 ^[6]. The evening went badly. Critics blamed an overloaded production and technical failures more than the score, but the verdict wounded Barber deeply. He spent long periods in Italy afterward and composed less, though he revised the opera with Menotti's help for a better-received revival at the Juilliard School in 1975 ^[6].

Works still came, at a slower pace: the cantata The Lovers on poems of Pablo Neruda, the Third Essay for Orchestra, premiered by the New York Philharmonic in 1978, and late songs. A projected oboe concerto remained unfinished at his death, its single completed movement published as the Canzonetta ^[2].

Barber was diagnosed with cancer in the late 1970s. He died in his Manhattan apartment on January 23, 1981, at the age of seventy, and was buried in Oaklands Cemetery in West Chester, near his parents ^[7]. A plot beside his was reserved for Menotti, who was ultimately buried in Scotland after his death in 2007.

For much of the postwar era, critics aligned with the avant-garde treated Barber's tonal idiom as a survival from an earlier age. He never adjusted his language to fashion, and by the 1980s and 1990s, as minimalism and a new tonality changed the climate, his consistency began to look like integrity rather than conservatism. Any Samuel Barber biography written today can note that his concert works are performed and recorded more often than those of most of his American contemporaries ^[2].

The Adagio for Strings occupies a category of its own. It has served as public music of mourning in the United States and abroad, was performed at memorial events after the September 11 attacks, and in a 2004 poll of listeners of the BBC's Today programme was voted the saddest classical work ever written ^[4]. Barber's own choral arrangement of the piece, an Agnus Dei from 1967, extended its life into the choir loft.

Singers may owe him the most. Knoxville: Summer of 1915, the Hermit Songs, Dover Beach, and dozens of individual songs form one of the largest bodies of American art song by a single composer, and Vanessa has returned to the Metropolitan Opera and to houses in Europe ^[5]. The centenary of his birth in 2010 brought festivals, recordings, and scholarly reassessment, confirming a place in the repertoire that no shift in critical fashion has dislodged ^[3].