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Classical music

Samuel Barber: a forgotten neo Romantic

great
We all know his Adagio for Strings from Platoon, if nowhere
else , but little else Samuel Barber wrote. Leon McCawley urges
a revival of a neglected 20th century great

Samuel Barber in 1944 with the score of his new Second Symphony, dedicated to the US Army Air Force. Photograph:
Lebrecht Music & Arts Photo Library

Leon McCawley
Thu 18 Nov 2010 22.44 GMT

18 7

T
his year has seen a glut of important musical anniversaries.
We've had Chopin aplenty, plus Schumann and Mahler to boot.
Samuel Barber's centenary (1910-1981) has also fallen during this
eventful season, but I guess we're out of candles and there's no
more cake. Why has this wonderful composer somehow missed the cut?
At the tender age of nine, Barber left this touching note for his mother:

"Dear Mother: I have written this to tell you my worrying secret. Now
don't cry when you read it because it is neither yours nor my fault. I
suppose I shall have to tell it now without any nonsense. To begin with I
was not meant to be an athlete. I was meant to be a composer, and will be
I'm sure. I'll ask you one more thing – don't ask me to try and forget this
unpleasant thing and go and play football. Please – Sometimes I've been
worrying about this so much that it makes me mad (not very). Love, Sam
Barber II."

His precocious sense of his musical destiny Advertisement

was indeed prophetic. Barber became one of

the most important and honoured American
composers of the 20th century. He wrote more
than 100 songs, three operas, three concertos,
two ballets, two symphonies and a variety of
significant orchestral, choral, chamber and
solo piano music. His most celebrated works
include the beautifully conceived Knoxville:
Summer of 1915 for soprano and orchestra, the
wistful Violin Concerto, the powerful Piano
Sonata (premiered by the great Russian
virtuoso Vladimir Horowitz) and the Pulitzer-winning opera Vanessa. And
of course his ubiquitous Adagio for Strings, which, despite countless
metamophoses, including its use on the soundtracks to Oliver Stone's
Platoon and David Lynch's The Elephant Man and its status as America's
favoured state funeral music, remains an effectively poignant work. Only
Anthony and Cleopatra, the commissioned work that opened the new
Metropolitan Opera in New York in 1966, was considered a critical failure
at its premiere – a severe blow for the composer, who felt the ravishing
score contained some of his best music. (Its failure is now generally
attributed to Franco Zeffirelli's elaborate and overblown production.)

Barber has been particularly praised for the lyrical quality of his music:
memorable melodies abound throughout, and connect back to his happy
childhood in West Chester, Pennsylvania. His aunt Louise Homer was a
leading operatic contralto, and her husband, Sidney Homer, a talented
composer who nurtured and supported his nephew's musical life. Barber's
innate gift for setting unusual texts to music surely links back to these
nostalgic days. Listen to Knoxville as sung by Leontyne Price and you'll
understand what I mean. It moves me to tears every time I hear it. There's
a sense of deep yearning and melancholia for this lost time. Like Barber, I
had a very happy childhood, an equal dislike for football and a clear sense
from an early age of my musical goal in life. Even though I now feel
blessed to be realising my dream, there's perhaps a slight regret for all
those lonely hours at the piano and all those moments I missed out on as a
child. Maybe Barber felt the same way.

My first real introduction to Barber came as a student in 1991 at the Curtis

Institute of Music in Philadelphia, also Barber's alma mater. I arrived for
my first lessons with the score of his Piano Sonata Op 26 in my hands. It
seemed the ideal challenge for a young, budding pianist, with its punchy,
energetic drive and knockout final Fugue. But I was keen to discover other
aspects of Barber's music, and immersed myself in the many recordings of
his works available in the Curtis library. I was bowled over by the soaring
melodies and biting rhythms, all pulsating within a cohesive, cleverly
conceived structure.

Barber's style can be described as neo-Romantic. He composed through a

modernist lens, incorporating some 20th-century techniques, but sourced
his main inspiration from the Romantic period, giving new life and vitality
to the forms and tonal language of the past. Like Brahms, whose classical
structures and baroque leanings sit comfortably next to his ardent
Romanticism, Barber was stimulated by the rich legacy that lay before him
(of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin and Brahms), but he always sought
new meaning, creating an individual and unmistakable voice for his own
deeply felt poeticism.

Barber's music was initially well received in the UK and well represented
on the concert scene. He had won praise from Vaughan Williams, who met
and heard Barber perform in the US in 1932 (he was an accomplished
baritone), and who congratulated him on his hauntingly evocative setting
of Matthew Arnold's poem Dover Beach, scored for voice and string
quartet: "I tried several times to set Dover Beach but you really got it!"

It seems his disappearance from our concert halls and CD shelves began in
the 1960s. Peter Dickinson, in his recent Barber biography, suggests his
neglect in the UK arose when Barber's works were too often compared
with Britten – whose work shares some similarity in its traditional, tonal
language – and deemed second rate to the British composer. Furthermore,
with avant garde and Modernism sweeping across the musical landscape,
Barber's works were felt to be outmoded and conservative, a feeling that
still works against him today. As visual artists in the US such as Jackson
Pollock were giving up draughtsmanship for abstract expressionism,
American composers such as Elliot Carter and John Cage were shunning
the tonality of their musical ancestors and searching for new possibilities
in music. Even though Barber dipped occasionally in these waters of
serialism (the Piano Sonata and Nocturne for solo piano feature 12-tone
rows), it was always in a tonal context.

Another criticism has been that Barber's music is not American enough.
Ironically, it was Copland, Gershwin and Bernstein, all born from Jewish
immigrants, who strove to create the "American" sound, while Barber –
from an old east coast American background, and distinctly Europhile –
sought deeper for a style that transcended nationality.

Barber's editor Paul Wittke wrote of his friend: "He demanded very little –
only intelligence and perfection. Always elegantly dressed and urbane in
manner and speech, he seemed to belong to the world of Henry James and
Edith Wharton. But beneath the aristocratic surface of his cosmopolitan
gaiety lived a most private, dedicated and disciplined man."

Barber was a composer who remained devoted to his art, never wavering
from what he believed in. We might often hear the Adagio for Strings and
the Violin concerto, but I only wish we could celebrate more of his lesser-
known works in concert: the wonderfully challenging Piano Concerto
(another Pulitzer winner), Cello Concerto and Sonata, the many beautiful
and contrastingly characterful songs, and his Essays for orchestra. With
now only a few weeks to go before the end of the year, I hope we can light
a few candles to honour this gifted composer and give him the acclaim he
so richly deserves.

Leon McCawley performs works by Barber and Chopin at the Queen

Elizabeth Hall, London, on 1 December. His recording of Barber's piano
music will be released by Somm Recordings in the spring.

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Topics
Classical music
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comments 7
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musicdirektor 19 Nov 2010 3:34 0

I am inspired to rediscover Barber's works afresh now. His Essays for orchestra and
symphonies are particular favourites of mine (especially because of his use of orchestral
piano). I was also fascinated to hear the String Quartet (from which the Adagio has been
'lifted') the other day for the first time. A strange piece and really quite angular, considering
the Adagio. But then, a fair amount of his output was actually quite angular as well as lyrical
I suppose. Not a million miles away from Prokofiev in this sense.

Thank you, Mr McCawley, for this article. I shall look forward to your recording of the piano
works.
Report

joolsa40 19 Nov 2010 3:42 0

Interesting article. I think it's reasonable to say that Barber fell foul of the post war era and
it's obsession with dismissing anyone who didn't follow modernist constructs. We're not
exactly short of neglected composers in this country either. Plus Barber was a fairly private
t i t bi bli t lf bli it
 man, not given to big public pronouncements or self-publicity.

Having said that, his Violin Concerto and 1st Symphony are still performed fairly regularly.
Sometimes the issue for a composer like Barber is that everyone expects his music to sounds
a certain way and when he did produce something astringent like his Piano Concerto, he falls
between two opposing camps.

Knoxville is a beautiful work - perhaps it needs a 'name' champion to sing it and highlight
just how good it is.
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