Samuel Barber was born in 1910. He was a child prodigy; he started studying music when he was six, started composing when he was seven, became a professional church organist when he was twelve, and was accepted as a student at Curtis when he was 14, where he studied for ten years while finishing high school and taking several excursions to Europe where he studied and made important connections in Paris, Turin and Vienna. He was 23 when his first orchestral work, the School for Scandal Overture, was premiered by the Philadelphia Orchestra. When he finally graduated from Curtis in 1934 he sang his own setting of Matthew Arnold's famous poem Dover Beach at the ceremony with his mellifluous baritone accompanied by a student string quartet, which he recorded the following year to a rapturous reception. While there was no question that he would always compose, he made serious moves in the direction of a singing career, signing a contract with NBC in 1935 for weekly radio performances and recording an album of his singing a varied program of short selections in 1938, in which he accompanied himself at the piano, another considerable talent of his. He also studied conducting with Fritz Reiner and George Szell and briefly considered that as a career option as well. But the success of his first symphony, the rare American symphonic work to achieve international acclaim and numerous performances, is what really put the world on notice as to his genius, and with the premiere of his Adagio for Strings in 1938 on a live broadcast conducted by Arturo Toscanini (the result of him asking Barber to adapt the slow movement of his String Quartet for string orchestra), there was no turning back: the United States had its next great composer.
What’s remarkable about Barber’s story is that he faced virtually no impediments to his rising success. His father was a doctor, his mother was a pianist (whose sister was a contralto who frequently appeared at the Metropolitan Opera), and he grew up in comfort in suburban Pennsylvania. At Curtis he was taken under the wing of the school’s founder who personally introduced him to the Schirmer family who became his lifelong publisher. It's probably due to the constantly rising trajectory of his career throughout his life that when he finally suffered a notable career setback at age 56 with the failure of his opera Antony and Cleopatra, he took it very hard, drinking to excess, driving away his loyal partner of four decades Gian Carlo Menotti, and drastically slowing the rate of his productivity. His next (and last) major work, The Lovers - a cantata based on poems by Pablo Neruda, written in 1970 - was trashed by many of the critics of the time, compounding his depression and isolation, leading to a sad final decade for what should have been a triumphant well-earned retirement, ending with a four-year battle with cancer and death in early 1981. (The Lovers is now generally regarded as a masterpiece, while Antony and Cleopatra has yet to fully recover from the harsh reception it initially received, despite some extensive revisions and an acknowledgement that Barber wasn't to blame for the disastrous production given of it by the Met that undoubtedly affected critics' opinions.)
His death occurred just a few months after the release of the late David Lynch's film The Elephant Man, which introduced Barber's Adagio for Strings to a new generation. Lynch insisted on using the piece in the soundtrack over the objections of the film's composer John Morris; the deciding vote went to the film's producer Mel Brooks (yes, that Mel Brooks) who agreed with Lynch that the Barber worked well for the film, and its use undoubtedly led to its even more famous use in the film Platoon six years later - two of the most moving scenes in the history of cinema. Like the famous Adagietto from Mahler's Fifth Symphony, it's a piece that has come to be associated with death and mourning even though that wasn't the composer's intention at all. In Barber's case, he was thinking about Virgil's poem Georgics - an epic poem from 29 BC about agriculture! The quartet begins with an uneasy fast movement that seems to represent the toil and urgency of a village completing its preparation of the farm to last throughout the winter months. This is not the fun harvest song of Vivaldi's Autumn; the toil is hard work and, every year, it has an ever more destructive effect on the environment, meaning that humans have to intervene even more in the process to ensure the continued sustainability of the farm. The famous adagio represents the long winter in which, underneath the snow and ice, the soil regenerates itself; the music describes a landscape devoid of humanity, ironic for a piece that has become associated with the deepest human emotions. The brief third movement is a truncated version of the first, letting us know that Spring is just as un-Vivaldi-ish as Autumn in the real world, a time when human intervention returns, and with it its propensity for destruction. (This explains why most people, including Toscanini, just want the Adagio by itself, but listening to it in context gives it a different meaning that's just as moving as the Oscar-winning images we associate with it.)
So we see that, decades before Barber's own life took a dark turn after sustained success, Barber was still emotionally affected by the darkness of the world he was born into even though his privilege shielded him from the worst of it. While Arnold's 19th-century poem Dover Beach seems in retrospect like an uncanny prophecy of WWI, Barber's setting of it in 1931 seems like an eerie prophecy of WWII. The first image in the poem is a calm sea (The sea is calm tonight./The tide is full, the moon lies fair/Upon the straits) but of course even a calm sea is constantly moving, and Barber imitates the moving of gentle waves with a violin oscillating between two strings. You hear Arnold's images of a moonlit sea, but in its uneasy harmony you also hear Barber's anxiety that the peace could be disturbed at any minute by forces that Arnold could not have imagined. The ending of the poem contains its most famous lines (And here we are as on a darkling plain/Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight/Where ignorant armies clash by night) and you can imagine someone like Verdi giving us a loud graphic vision of those armies clashing. But what Barber does instead is something that Arnold does not do, which is to return us to the sea, the one constant primal force that will outlast human folly.
Setting English poetry to music is notoriously difficult, and Barber proved early on that his ability to do so was one of his unique strengths. Ralph Vaughan WIlliams praised Barber for his setting of Dover Beach, saying the younger man had succeeded where he had failed in his own attempts to set the poem. But Barber made it easier for himself by including the string quartet; in this way the piece is as much a commentary on the poem as a translation of it to another medium. But he soon followed it with a work that allowed him nowhere to hide: his setting for a capella choir of Three Reincarnations by the Irish poet James Stephens. In the first, Mary Hynes, Barber draws on the techniques of the Elizabethan madrigal composers like Morley and Weelkes without sounding in the slightest bit archaic, perfectly capturing the imagery of "a dart of love" with its breathless rising phrases, and the phrase "lovely and airy" could not be better depicted. in Anthony O'Daly, Barber creates a complete emotional journey with masterful economy of means: we hear the tolling of the funeral bell, keeping time for the formal lamentations; but in the course of three minutes we hear the gradual realization that Anthony is, in fact, gone, and Barber goes beyond Stephens in capturing what it's like to be at a funeral when the reality of the reason you're there suddenly hits you on a gut level. In The Coolin, the music and words conspire to keep us guessing whether a romantic encounter "out on the side of a hill" is a memory of something that actually happened, a fantasy of what you wished to have happened, or a meeting where one or both parties are ghosts. It's one of the great pieces of secular choral music.
At the same time that he wrote these Reincarnations, he wrote perhaps his second-most famous work after the Adagio - the Violin Concerto. These were the years 1939-1941, and a sensitive soul like Barber's could not fail to feel the tension building up to the war. I've always felt that this concerto is to WWII what Vaughan Williams' The Lark Ascending, a 1914 piece for violin and orchestra, is to WWI. Both contain soaring, sublime moments that feel like the calm before the storm, with a palpable underlying unease. In the case of the Lark, it's a feeling of wistful melancholy, nostalgic for the moment as you're living it, with an uncertainty as to what's to come and still a sliver of hope. The Violin Concerto is far less naive, with a firmer grasp and dread of what's to come, coupled not with nostalgia but with determination to enjoy the peace while it's here. The three movements seem to take us through one last day in the country, one last day with one's beloved, and one last day bustling in the big city before being shipped off to war.
Barber served in the Army Air Corps (the forerunner to the Air Force) from 1942 to 1945. He was already a celebrity at this point, and being in his thirties, slightly past his fighting prime, and definitely not possessed of a military disposition, it's not surprising that he was allowed to do some composing while on duty. During the war Barber made a surprising turn to genre experiments. He made a game attempt to fulfill his patriotic duty by writing a Commando March for concert band; his Capricorn Concerto was an exercise in Stravinskian neo-classicism, a modern take on a Baroque concerto grosso; and the piano suite Excursions finds Barber finally acknowledging his American-ness with sketches of jazz and folksong that both emulate Copland and Gershwin while offering an alternative way of "translating" those idioms into "classical." But the major work to come out of this period was the Cello Concerto. It was commissioned toward the end of the war in 1945, and completed and premiered in 1946, so it could be said to form a bookend to the war with the Violin Concerto. Both the similarities and differences between the two works are telling. In place of the Violin Concerto's long languid phrases, the Cello Concerto offers short motifs, building much of the first movement on dotted rhythms like a Scotch snap and the minor third, the interval of children's games that begins Brahms' Lullaby. He does manage to build some melodies that almost soar out of these materials, but it always comes back to small cells of two or three notes. The cello part is extremely difficult to play and requires great concentration; the soloist's tension also has a way of focusing the audience, trying to make out complete phrases out of little bits of information, akin to deciphering Morse code, which was doubtless one of Barber's war duties. The slow movement offers a disturbing and moving counterpart to the slow movement of the Violin Concerto; once again we have an oboe in conversation with the soloist, but it's much more strained, like the difference between a pre-war and post-war encounter with a loved one. It's in the last movement that the work moves to a different plane, offering an apotheosis that recalls the Elgar Concerto while anticipating the cello concertos of Shostakovich and Britten still to come. When listening to the most intense moments of those concertos of the late 50s and 60s it's sobering to realize that Barber got there first in the 40s.
Barber's legacy and reputation is still a work in progress. The critics who savaged his late works prized the modern and dissonant and dismissed the tonal and overtly emotional as conservative or even reactionary. Even in 1949, his very thorny, dissonant Piano Sonata was hailed as a masterpiece, while critics were hesitant to admit they liked the lyrical, evocative Knoxville: Summer of 1915 from the same period. Aaron Copland drew a clear distinction between his populist, tonal style of writing in works like Appalachian Spring and modernist works like the Piano Variations, while Leonard Bernstein wrote music for the concert hall that wouldn't appear in one of his Broadway shows and vice versa. But Barber didn't segregate his music like that, which drove many critics crazy, even though they're the only ones who saw this as a problem.
In fact, many great artists like Toscanini, Bruno Walter and Vladimir Horowitz, who would have never thought to perform Copland or Bernstein, embraced Barber's music. And even though he steeped himself in the European tradition, and mostly eschewed "popular" or "native" signifiers, his music somehow still sounds American. Perhaps he understood that what really defines our country's musical style isn't pentatonic scales, or references to the blues or cowboy songs. It's an attitude of being unapologetically oneself, to claim the right to not be put into a specific category and appropriate styles as one sees fit. There's definitely an ugly side to that attitude, but Barber meant no harm - he treated music as a universal language because no one told him he couldn't. He used his privilege to create beautiful and powerful music, which seems like the best possible use of it.
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