Samuel Osmond Barber II (March 9, 1910 – January 23, 1981) was an American composer, pianist, conductor, baritone, and music educator, and one of the most celebrated composers of the mid-20th century. Principally influenced by nine years' composition studies with Rosario Scalero at the Curtis Institute and more than 25 years' study with his uncle, the composer Sidney Homer, Barber's music usually eschewed the experimental trends of musical modernism in favor of traditional 19th-century harmonic language and formal structure embracing lyricism and emotional expression. However, he adopted elements of modernism after 1940 in some of his compositions, such as an increased use of dissonance and chromaticism in the Cello Concerto (1945) and Medea's Dance of Vengeance (1955); and the use of tonal ambiguity and a narrow use of serialism in his Piano Sonata (1949), Prayers of Kierkegaard (1954), and Nocturne (1959).

Barber was adept at both instrumental and vocal music. His works became successful on the international stage and many of his compositions enjoyed rapid adoption into the classical performance canon. In particular, his Adagio for Strings (1936) has earned a permanent place in the orchestral concert repertory, as has that work's adaptation for chorus, Agnus Dei (1967). He received the Pulitzer Prize for Music twice: for his opera Vanessa (1956–1957), and for the Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (1962). Also widely performed is his Knoxville: Summer of 1915 (1947), a setting for soprano and orchestra of a prose text by James Agee. At the time of Barber's death, nearly all of his compositions had been recorded. Many of his compositions were commissioned or first performed by such noted groups and artists as the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Opera, Vladimir Horowitz, Eleanor Steber, Raya Garbousova, John Browning, Leontyne Price, Pierre Bernac, Francis Poulenc, and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. and he was also featured weekly on NBC Radio in 1935–1936 performing German lieder and art songs. He also occasionally conducted performances and recordings of his works with symphony orchestras during the 1950s, and taught composition at the Curtis Institute from 1939 to 1942.

Barber was in a relationship with the Italian composer Gian Carlo Menotti for more than 40 years. They lived at Capricorn, a house just north of New York City, where they frequently hosted parties with academic and music luminaries. Menotti was Barber's librettist for two of his three operas. When the relationship ended in 1970, they remained close friends until Barber's death from cancer in 1981.

At the age of 10, Barber wrote his first operetta, The Rose Tree, to a libretto by the family's cook. At the age of 12, he became an organist at a local church. At the age of 14, Barber entered the youth artist program at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where he ultimately spent ten years developing his talents as a triple prodigy in composition, voice, and piano. Following his graduation from high school in 1928, he entered the adult professional program at Curtis from which he graduated in 1934. At Curtis he studied piano with George Frederick Boyle and Isabelle Vengerova, composition with Rosario Scalero, conducting with Fritz Reiner, and voice with Emilio de Gogorza.

Barber returned to Italy in the summer of 1929 using funds he received upon winning the Bearns Prize; this time with Menotti as his travel companion. He returned to Paris in the summer of 1930, and in the summers of 1931 and 1933 both Barber and Menotti studied composition with Rosario Scalero in Montestrutto, Turin while staying with Menotti's parents in Cadegliano. making his professional conducting debut in Vienna on January 4, 1934. In March 1934 he returned to Philadelphia to finish his studies at Curtis.

After graduating from Curtis in the spring of 1934, Barber pursued further studies in conducting and singing with John Braun in Vienna in the summers of 1935 and 1936 through the aid of a Pulitzer traveling scholarship.

Mid career (1942–1966)

In 1942, after the US entered World War II, Barber joined the Army Air Corps where he remained in service through 1945. Barber's first work after his military induction was the "Commando March" (1943), which was his only work for a concert band. It was premièred by the Army Air Forces Technical Training Command Band in Atlantic City on May 23, 1943. Sergei Koussevitzky commissioned an orchestral version for performance by the Boston Symphony that same year.

While in the Army Air Corps Barber was commissioned to write several works for the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO), including his Cello Concerto for Raya Garbousova and his Second Symphony, a work he later suppressed. and recorded the following year by the New Symphony Orchestra of London, conducted by Barber himself. According to some sources, Barber destroyed the score in 1964. Hans Heinsheimer was an eyewitness, and reported that he accompanied Barber to the publisher's office where they collected all the music from the library, and Barber "tore up all these beautifully and expensively copied materials with his own hands". Doubt has been cast on this story, however, on grounds that Heinsheimer, as an executive at G. Schirmer, would have been unlikely to have allowed Barber into the Schirmer offices to watch him rip apart the music that his company had invested money in publishing. The score was later reconstructed from the instrumental parts, and released in a Vox Box "Stradivari Classics" recording by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Andrew Schenck in 1988.

In 1943, Barber and Menotti purchased 'Capricorn', a house north of New York City in suburban Mount Kisco. The home served as their artistic retreat up until 1972, and it was at this house that Barber had his most productive years as a composer during the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s. Price also sang for the premiere of Barber's cantata Prayers of Kierkegaard with the BSO in 1954, and would become closely associated with performances of his music over the next two decades.

In 1958 Barber won the Pulitzer Prize for Music for his first opera Vanessa which premiered at the Metropolitan Opera in January 1958 with a cast that included opera stars Eleanor Steber, Rosalind Elias, Regina Resnik, Nicolai Gedda, and Giorgio Tozzi. The Met took the production to the Salzburg Festival later that year, becoming the first American opera to be performed at that festival. Menotti wrote the libretto for both Vanessa, and Barber's second opera A Hand of Bridge. This latter work premiered at the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto, Italy in 1959 with a cast that included Patricia Neway and William Lewis.

In 1962 Barber became the first American composer to attend the biennial Congress of Soviet Composers in Moscow. That same year he won the Pulitzer Prize a second time for his Piano Concerto which was one of three works by him commissioned for the opening of Lincoln Center and was performed at the opening of Philharmonic Hall with pianist John Browning in September 1962. The second work performed for the opening of Lincoln Center was his Andromache's Farewell, a piece for soprano and orchestra, which was premiered by the New York Philharmonic and soprano Martina Arroyo with Thomas Schippers conducting in April 1963. The final composition composed for Lincoln center was his third and final opera, Antony and Cleopatra, which premiered at the opening of the new Metropolitan Opera House in 1966 with Leontyne Price and Justino Diaz in the title roles. Barber worked on the opera in Greece and was visited by writer William Goyen's former lover, American artist Joseph Glasco and his collector-friend Stanley Seeger. This visit may have proved to be a distraction and the work was poorly received by critics, although Barber himself believed it contained some of his best work, and he spent the decade following its premiere revising the opera.

Later years (1966–1981)

thumb|Samuel Barber's grave, on the left, at [[Oaklands Cemetery outside West Chester. The plot on the right had been purchased for Gian Carlo Menotti; as he did not use it, a stone inscribed "To the Memory of Two Friends" was erected there instead.]]

After the harsh rejection of his third opera Antony and Cleopatra (1966), Barber battled with depression and alcoholism which had a negative impact on his creative productivity.

During his troubled later years, Barber continued to write music until he was almost 70 years old. In 1967, he successfully adapted his Adagio for Strings (1936) to a choral work, Agnus Dei, set to the Latin liturgical mass text on the Lamb of God. The work has become widely performed and recorded by choirs internationally. In 1969, Leontyne Price performed the premiere of Barber's song cycle Despite and Still which emphasized textual themes of loneliness, isolation, and lost love; all issues present in Barber's own personal life at the time of this work's creation. This work adopted a more modern dissonant harmonic language with vivid textual imagery characterized by tonal ambiguity and a frequent use of chromaticism, conflicting triads, tritones, and whole-tone segments.

In 1971, his cantata The Lovers was well received by audiences and critics when it premiered in performances with the Philadelphia Orchestra, Finnish baritone Tom Krause, and the Temple University Chorus directed by Robert Page. The Third Essay for Orchestra (1978) was his last major work. The funeral was held at the First Presbyterian Church of West Chester three days later His final composition, Canzonetta for oboe and string orchestra (1981), was published after his death. Initially intended to be a fully developed oboe concerto, Barber only completed the second movement of that work.

Achievements and awards

At the time of Barber's death in 1981, Pulitzer Prize winning music critic Donal Henahan wrote in The New York Times about Barber that "probably no other American composer has ever enjoyed such early, such persistent and such long-lasting acclaim". He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and, as a Fellow, to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1961.

Barber was awarded the Edward MacDowell Medal in 1980 by the MacDowell Colony for outstanding contribution to the arts. In 1998, the American Classical Music Hall of Fame inducted Barber posthumously.

In addition to composing, Barber was active in organizations that sought to help musicians and promote music. He was president of the International Music Council of UNESCO. He worked to bring attention to and ameliorate adverse conditions facing musicians and musical organizations worldwide. He was one of the first American composers to visit Russia (then part of the Soviet Union). Barber was also influential in the successful campaign by composers against ASCAP, the goal of which was to increase royalties paid to composers.

Music

Orchestral

Through the success of his Overture to The School for Scandal (1931), Music for a Scene from Shelley (1933), Adagio for Strings (1936), (First) Symphony in One Movement (1936), (First) Essay for Orchestra (1937) and Violin Concerto (1939), Barber garnered performances by the world's leading conductors such as Artur Rodziński, Eugene Ormandy, Dimitri Mitropoulos, Bruno Walter, Charles Münch, George Szell, Leopold Stokowski, and Thomas Schippers.

Among his works are four concertos, one each for violin (1939), cello (1945) and piano (1962), and the neoclassical Capricorn Concerto for flute, oboe, trumpet and string orchestra (1944). He also wrote a concertante work for organ and orchestra entitled Toccata Festiva (1960).

Barber's final opus was the Canzonetta for oboe and string orchestra (1977–78), Op. 48, originally intended as the second movement of an oboe concerto.

Piano

Barber's most important and most played works for the piano include his Excursions, Op. 20, which emulate four styles of classic American idioms, including the boogie-woogie and blues, and the Piano Sonata in E-flat minor, Op. 26. The Nocturne (Homage to John Field), Op. 33, is another respected piece which he composed for the instrument. In 1977, the Van Cliburn Foundation commissioned Barber to write a Ballade, Op. 46, for the fifth Van Cliburn International Piano Competition.

Opera

Menotti supplied the libretto for Barber's opera Vanessa. (Menotti also contributed the libretto for Barber's chamber opera A Hand of Bridge.) In 1956, using his vocal training, Barber played and sang the score of Vanessa for the Metropolitan Opera's general manager, Rudolf Bing, who accepted the work. It premiered in January 1958. Vanessa won the 1958 Pulitzer Prize and gained acclaim as the first American grand opera.

Barber's Antony and Cleopatra was commissioned for the new Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center, and premiered at the opening of Opera House on September 16, 1966. The elaborate production, designed by Franco Zeffirelli, was plagued with technical disasters; it also overwhelmed and obscured Barber's music, which most critics derided as uncharacteristically weak and unoriginal. The critical rejection of music that Barber considered to be among his best sent him into a deep depression. In recent years, a revised version of Antony and Cleopatra, for which Menotti provided collaborative assistance, has enjoyed some success.

Violin

In 1939 Philadelphia industrialist Samuel Simeon Fels commissioned Barber to write a violin concerto for Fels's ward, Iso Briselli, a 1934 graduate from the Curtis Institute of Music (as Barber was). The Barber biographies written by Nathan Broder (1954) and Barbara B. Heyman (1992) discuss the genesis of the concerto during the period of the violin concerto's commission and subsequent year leading up to the first performance. Heyman interviewed Briselli and others familiar with the history for her book. In late 2010, previously unpublished letters written by Fels, Barber, and Albert Meiff (Briselli's violin coach in that period), from the Samuel Simeon Fels Papers archived at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, became available to the public.

Notable compositions

  • Dover Beach (medium voice and string quartet) (Op. 3, 1931)
  • The School for Scandal (overture) (Op. 5, 1931)
  • Cello Sonata (Op. 6, 1932)
  • Music for a Scene from Shelley (Op. 7, 1933)
  • (First) Symphony in One Movement (Op. 9, 1936)
  • Adagio for Strings (1936 arr. of second movement of the String Quartet, Op. 11, 1936)
  • Essay for Orchestra (Op. 12, 1938)
  • Violin Concerto (Op. 14, 1939)
  • Reincarnations for mixed chorus, (Op. 16, 1939–1940); words by Antoine Ó Raifteiri in translation by James Stephens
  • Second Essay for Orchestra (Op. 17, 1942)
  • Excursions (Op. 20, 1942–44)
  • Capricorn Concerto (Op. 21, 1944)
  • Cello Concerto (Op. 22, 1945)
  • Medea (ballet) (Op. 23, 1946)
  • Knoxville: Summer of 1915 (soprano and orchestra) (Op. 24, 1948)
  • Sonata for Piano (Op. 26, 1949)
  • Hermit Songs (Op. 29, 1953)
  • Prayers of Kierkegaard (soprano, choir and orchestra) (Op. 30, 1954)
  • Summer Music (wind quintet) (Op. 31, 1956)
  • Vanessa (opera) (Op. 32, 1957)
  • Nocturne (Homage to John Field) (piano) (Op. 33, 1959)
  • A Hand of Bridge (chamber opera) (Op. 35, 1959)
  • Toccata Festiva (organ and orchestra) (Op. 36, 1960)
  • Piano Concerto (Op. 38, 1962)
  • Agnus Dei (choral adaptation of Adagio for Strings, 1967)
  • Antony and Cleopatra (Op. 40, opera, 1966, rev. 1974)

Notes

Sources

  • , reprint of Schirmer, New York (1954).
  • Paperback reprint edition: Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2006. .

Further reading

  • Brévignon, Pierre. 2011. Samuel Barber, un nostalgique entre deux mondes. Paris: Editions Hermann. .
  • Károlyi, Ottó. 1996. Modern American Music: From Charles Ives to the Minimalists. London: Cygnus Arts; Madison [New Jersey]: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. (cloth); (pbk).
  • Lee, Douglas A. 2002. Masterworks of 20th-Century Music: The Modern Repertory Of The Symphony Orchestra. New York: Routledge.
  • Staubrand, Jens. 2009. Kierkegaard International Bibliography: Music Works and Plays: Appendix: About The Seducers Diary and the Illness and Death of Søren Kierkegaard, new edition. Copenhagen: Eget Forlag; i kommission hos Forlaget Underskoven. .
  • Wade, Graham. 2003. A Concise Guide to Understanding Music. Pacific, Missouri: Mel Bay Publications. .
  • Warrack, John Hamilton, and Ewan West. 1992. The Oxford Dictionary of Opera. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press
  • Homepage of Capricorn, the French Samuel Barber Society. (In English and French)
  • Article "Barber, A Composer Between Two Worlds" , by the Capricorn Society on American Center France
  • The Modern Word: Samuel Barber, a biography of Barber with notes on his many Joyce-inspired works.
  • Samuel Barber: Absolute Beauty – feature-length documentary film about the composer by H. Paul Moon
  • Samuel Barber collection, 1852–2000 at the Library of Congress
  • Samuel Barber digital collection at the Library of Congress