Patrick Bade
Samuel Barber: American Composer

Patrick Bade | Samuel Barber: American Composer | 03.17.24

Visuals displayed and music played throughout the presentation.

- I have to offer you an apology from last week because one of the tracks I played was in fact not Alfred Drake. Now I can’t hear very well on this computer what I’m playing you but even so it sounded all wrong to me. And at the end of my talk I spoke with Sam, his daughter, and she said, no, no, that wasn’t her dad. It’s a bit of a mystery ‘cause it is from a CD that she gave me. And we dunno who it’s actually, but some very sharp eared person in the comments last week did actually say it sounded more like Frank Sinatra. Well, I’m sure it’s not Frank Sinatra, but it’s not, it wasn’t Alfred Drake. Anyway, I hope you heard enough of his beautiful voice to get the measure of him last week. So onto one of America’s greatest 20th century composers. This is Samuel Barber, and I’m going to plunge you straight into his most famous piece of music. I’m sure you’ve all heard this because it gets constantly played.

♪ Music Plays ♪

That was the famous “Adagio for Strings”. It was originally written as a slow movement of a string quartet in 1936. And Samuel Barbers, still very young, quite unknown, sent the score to the great conductor, Arturo Toscanini. Didn’t hear for a long time. Thought was no hope, but eventually got a message from Toscanini. Yes, he liked it very much, but he wanted that slow movement arranged for full string orchestra. And Samuel Barber did this, and it was premiered in 1938. Photograph actually shows that premier in 1938. In the recording I played you, was Toscanini conducting in 1940. So Samuel Barber was born in 1910 in the town of Westchester in Pennsylvania. His parents were really quite grand, very posh. wasp, I suppose you’d say East Coast, upper class, educated, highly cultivated. of mainly Anglo-Saxon background. And there was certainly some art and music in the family. His mother was a gifted pianist. His aunt was the famous contralto, Louise Homer, who sang at the Met.

So he started composing at a very, very early age, in early childhood. He knew what he wanted right from the start 'cause that is a great gift in life. , here I am in my advanced age, still thinking, “What am I going to do when I grow up?” But when he was nine, he wrote a letter. “Dear Mother, I have to tell you my worrying secret. Now, don’t cry when you this 'cause it’s neither yours nor my fault, I suppose I will have to tell you 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 will ask you one more thing. Don’t ask me to try and forget this unpleasant thing and go play football, please. Sometimes I’ve been worrying about this so much that it makes me mad.” That’s a really extraordinary letter, isn’t it, for a 9-year-old to write. To have that sense of vocation so firmly already at the age of nine. Here he is as a little child. This is his famous aunt, Louise Homer.

There are plenty of records of her. She made records with Caruso. There she is as Amneris. She sang with him in Aida. And on the right hand side there is the young Samuel Barber. He’s on the right. In the middle is Louise Homer and her husband, Sidney Homer, who was a composer and who was a great mentor to the young Samuel Barber. And in the middle to the right is Gian Carlo Menotti. There’s another secret I suppose he had probably had to come out with to his mother a little later that he was homosexual. And in fact, as a very young man, met the very beautiful Italian composer, Gian Carlo Menotti. And they were in a relationship for over 40 years. Sadly, right at the end, their relationship was undermined by his alcoholism and depression at the end of his life.

But even after they split up, they remained on very loving terms with one another. Here they are, two very beautiful young men, Menotti on the left and Samuel Barber on the right. So at the age of 16, he went to study at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. This is how it looked at the time. And he was one of the most brilliant students they have ever had in that institution. And so I’m going to play you next. And his first major orchestral work written when he was just 21 years old and he called it “Overture to School for Scandal”, the 18th Century play is called “The Scandal”. He never wrote an opera. It was just really a piece of music evoking the farcical mood of “School for Scandal”. And it begins with a kind of orchestral burst of laughter. Very brilliant piece of orchestration, absolutely amazing for a 21-year-old with no previous experience to handle the orchestra in this way.

♪ Music Plays ♪

It’s a brilliant multicoloured orchestration, a whiff of Klaus, perhaps. And here he is with Mary Louise Curtis Bach. We heard about her previously that she supported the bad boy of music. Although she was sorely tried by his misbehaviour, she supported him financially for 19 years. But so if George Antheil was the bad boy of music, Samuel Barber, he was the good boy. And well, I think you can see from the way she’s smiling at him in that photograph that she was deeply fond of him and encouraged him greatly at the beginning of his career.

So he won a scholarship to come to Europe. This was 1935. You could say he got in, in the nick of time really, as the shadows were looming over Europe by mid 1930s. You’ve got Hitler already ensconced in Germany, Mussolini well ensconced in Italy. But he spent the winter of 1935 to 6 in Rome and just 25 years old, wrote his first symphony. And that was premiered in Rome in 1936. And then amazingly, it was the first major work by an American ever performed at the Salzburg Festival of 1937. So here is the opening of Samuel Barber’s first symphony.

♪ Music Plays ♪

But apart from the “Adagio” the most successful of his early works was his Violin Concerto. And this was commissioned in 1939 by a wealthy sponsor of a fellow student from the Curtis Institute, a violinist. And it had a difficult birth, you could say because neither the violinist nor his sponsor was satisfied with it. Initially, they complained, “Oh, it’s too easy.” They wanted a, a showy, violin concerto that would show off this guy’s technique. So this was just the first two movements. So then Barber added a very brilliant, fast moving third movement. And then they said, “Oh no, it’s too difficult. We can’t perform it.”

And they complained that the whole thing was not well written for the violin. And they demanded that it should be rewritten. And he stood his ground. So he must have been very confident about it. 'cause he said, “No, I’m not going to change it.” And then they rejected it and he had to return half the fee and so on. But the great conductor, Fritz Reiner, émigré in America at this time, agreed to do a trial run at the Curtis Institute. And everybody agreed, no, this is absolutely performable. And it had its official premier in 1940. And well, I hope that the guy who commissioned it felt suitably chastened 'cause it was a tremendous success and it immediately established itself in the standard repertoire. So again, it’s a work which may be well familiar to you. It’s one of the most performed of 20th century violin concertos. And particularly the first movement is absolutely gorgeous, very, very haunting, very, very melodic.

♪ Music Plays ♪

Now you think, how could anybody have dismissed that as unplayable, that very famous recording with Isaac Stern conducted by Linda Bernstein, it practically seems to play itself. But of course he was in very good company. Think of Tchaikovsky having his violin concerto, his first piano concerto rejected as unplayable or Bizet’s “Carmen” critics saying it had no tunes. People have said some very silly things about famous pieces of music in the past. So when the Second World War broke out, of course he was military age and he was drafted into the military and he was in the Air Army Corps. You can see him in his uniform here. But he wasn’t sent to the front line line. I mean, he was already famous. And I think the American Army or Air Force thought he was probably more useful to them writing music and winning prestige for America.

Remember the axis that the Nazis and the fascists, a part of their propaganda was that Anglo-Saxon countries, Britain and America had no culture. So it was really quite important, I think, for them, for both Britain and America in the Second World War, to promote their own music, literature and culture. You see him here talking to the great conductor, Serge Koussevitzky, the conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, who is another one of his mentors early in his career. So the most important piece of work that came out of his military experience was his second symphony. And this was a broadcast on short wave across the Atlantic to Europe. And in fact, it wasn’t a success at the time, it wasn’t well received. And he was always somebody who was very thin skinned, as we’ve heard, not in the case of the violin concerto.

But otherwise, he was very sensitive to criticism. And he became so uncertain that he destroyed the score of the second symphony and it was never performed again in his lifetime. But after his death, the orchestral parts were found and the score was reconstructed and it was relaunched. And it’s now a work that’s performed quite regularly. It was maybe not quite what people were expecting from him because after the melodic lushness of the “Adagio” and the the violin concerto, it’s much more acerbic, it’s much more aggressive, it’s much more dissonant. And in the first movement, which I’m going to play you, I think it’s trying to give you a sense of the movement of machines, of flying machines in particular.

♪ Music Plays ♪

Well, that kind of dissonance and aggression is rarely found in his work again. And the next piece I’m going to play you is absolutely drenched in nostalgia. I don’t know quite how to describe it, it’s not exactly a song cycle, it’s really an extended song, a series of poems, really, accompanied by orchestra. And it was commissioned by the very fine American soprano, Eleanor Steber, if you remember from last week, she was one of the finalists in the Met Auditions of the Air in 1939 alongside Alfred Drake.

And here you can see her with the composer and with the conductor, Dimitri Mitropoulos And this is “Knoxville: Summer of 1915”, and it’s a setting full voice and orchestra of “Poems by James Agee”, that evoke his childhood in the deep south of the States. Now as we’ve heard Samuel Barber himself, he was born in Pennsylvania, but he identified very strongly with this, the evocation of small town American life in the early years of the 20th century in these “Poems by James Agee” and here is “Knoxville: Summer of 1915” with the singer who commissioned the songs, Eleanor Steber.

♪ It has become that time of evening ♪ ♪ When people sit on their porches ♪ ♪ Rocking gently and talking gently ♪ ♪ And watching the street ♪ ♪ And the standing up into their sphere ♪ ♪ Of possession of the trees ♪ ♪ Of birds’ hung havens, hangars ♪ ♪ People go by, things go by ♪ ♪ A horse, drawing a buggy ♪ ♪ Breaking his hollow iron music on the asphalt ♪ ♪ A loud auto, a quiet auto ♪ ♪ People in pairs, not in a hurry ♪ ♪ Scuffling, switching their weight of aestival body ♪ ♪ Talking casually ♪ ♪ The taste hovering over them of vanilla ♪ ♪ Strawberry, pasteboard, and starched milk ♪ ♪ The image upon them of lovers and horsemen ♪ ♪ Squared with clowns in hueless amber ♪ ♪ A streetcar raising its iron moan ♪ ♪ Stopping ♪ ♪ Belling and starting, stertorous ♪ ♪ Rousing and raising again ♪ ♪ Its iron increasing moan ♪ ♪ And swimming its gold windows and straw seats ♪ ♪ On past and past and past ♪ ♪ The bleak spark crackling and cursing above it ♪ ♪ Like a small malignant spirit ♪ ♪ Set to dog its tracks ♪ ♪ The iron whine rises on rising speed ♪ ♪ Still risen, faints, halts ♪ ♪ The faint stinging bell ♪ ♪ Rises again, still fainter ♪ ♪ Fainting, lifting lifts ♪ ♪ Faints foregone ♪ ♪ Forgotten ♪

The bulk of of Barbara’s music is vocal, as I’ve said. His aunt was a very famous singer and he was very close to her and very fond of her. And he himself had a very fine baritone singing voice. And he trained as a singer and even considered following a career as a singer and there are recordings of him singing his own songs that are very beautiful. In 1953, he accompanied the very young Leontyne Price in a concert at the Library of Congress. And this is a drawing of that occasion. This is several years before her breakthrough to fame and her 1961 debut at the Metropolitan Opera.

And so she sang songs by Samuel Barber and she gave the premier of his “Hermit Songs”. And these again are photographs of them together performing these songs. The “Hermit Songs are settings of texts written by early mediaeval Irish monks. I’m going to play you two of them. The first one is a rather naughty one actually rather surprising for a monk. And the title is Promiscuity. It’s a very short song, only lasts a few seconds. And the words are, "I do not know with whom Eden will sleep tonight but I do know Fair Eden will not sleep alone.” So this is Leonine Price accompanied by the composer, Samuel Barber.

♪ I do not know with whom Eden will sleep ♪ ♪ But I do know Fair Eden will not sleep alone ♪

The next song I’m going to play you is “The Monk and the Cat”. And it’s the monk singing of his happiness living alone with his beloved cat.

♪ Pangur, white Pangur, ♪ ♪ How happy we are ♪ ♪ Alone together, Scholar and cat. ♪ ♪ Each has his own work to do daily; ♪ ♪ For you it is hunting, for me study. ♪ ♪ Your shining eye watches the wall ♪ My feeble eye is fixed on a book. You rejoice when your claws entrap a mouse; I rejoice when my mind fathoms a problem. Pleased with his own art Neither hinders the other Thus we live ever without tedium and envy. ♪ Pangur, white Pangur, ♪ ♪ How happy we are ♪ ♪ Alone together, Scholar and cat ♪ ♪ Pangur, white Pangur ♪ ♪ How happy we are ♪

1957 saw the premier at the Metropolitan Opera of Samuel Barber’s Opera, “Vanessa”. Now there’d been numerous attempts ever since the Metropolitan was set up in the 1880s to create American opera. Many composers had been commissioned to write and not one single one of them succeeded, not one had entered the standard repertoire. So this was a very big risk really for Samuel Barber. His was the first, and actually, I’m just trying to think if there’s really been an opera since premiered at the Met that has really caught on. It’s the only one, I think, that is quite frequently performed in the opera houses of the world. And it is a wonderful piece, Vanessa.

It’s a rather gloomy, gothic story set in a country house of a middle-aged woman who was disappointed in love when she was young. And she’s longed ever since for the lover to come back. And she thinks he is coming back, but it turns out actually to be the son of her former lover. And history repeats itself when he seduces and gets pregnant her daughter. I won’t tell you how it all ends, but not well really, for anybody. And it’s a wonderful role for a singing actress. And they really wanted Maria Callas. They tried to persuade her, but she wouldn’t. And then when she turned it down, they asked the wonderful Croatian Soprano, Sena Jurinac, she also turned it down.

So they fell back on the reliable Eleanor Steber and actually she’s wonderful in the role and a recording was made with her. And here you see her with Barber on the right hand side and in the role on the left hand side. And I’m going to play you a quintet from the end where everybody is really reflecting on the situation and the sadness of all the characters and how all of them really have been frustrated in their dreams of happiness. And it’s incredibly poignant and beautiful piece. I really love this. And I think what he clearly had in mind when he wrote it, of course, was the great trio from Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier" where you have the three characters in a similar way, reflecting on their situation.

♪ To leave ♪ ♪ To stay ♪ ♪ To find ♪ ♪ To keep ♪ ♪ To stay ♪ ♪ To wait ♪ ♪ To hope ♪ ♪ To dream ♪ ♪ To weep and remember ♪ ♪ To love is all of this ♪ ♪ And none of it is love ♪ ♪ The light is not the sun ♪ ♪ Nor the tide the moon ♪ ♪ To leave ♪ ♪ To find ♪ ♪ To keep ♪ ♪ To stay ♪ ♪ To wait ♪ ♪ To weep and remember ♪ ♪ To stay ♪ ♪ To wait ♪ ♪ To weep and remember ♪ ♪ To stay ♪ ♪ To wait ♪

So as that opera had a tremendous success. As I said, I’ve seen , it’s been performed at , so I said it’s now standard repertoire. So when the Metropolitan Opera House moved to the Lincoln Centre in 1966, they very much wanted to open with a new American opera. And of course, the inevitable person to turn to the only one who really proved that he could do it was Samuel Barber. And so he was commissioned to write his setting of Shakespeare’s play, Anthony and Cleopatra. As usual, it was Gian Carlo Menotti who provided the libretto for him and the great expectations, but unfortunately they were not fulfilled and it was something of a disaster.

And there, there were a number of reasons for this that were not really to do with his score, particularly the production of Franco Zeffirelli, which was apparently way, way over the top and had incredibly complicated stage machinery that malfunctioned. And the whole thing turned into an absolute disaster and it really destroyed him. As I said, he was a thin skinned man. He did not take criticism well. And he went into a steep decline after this for the last years of his life of alcoholism and depression. And that, as I said, destroyed his relationship with Gian Carlo Menotti. I don’t think it’s ever been revived, but sections of it were recorded at the time with the original cast. And I thought I would play you the very fine orchestral interlude that leads to the final scene of the opera.

♪ Give me my robe ♪ ♪ Put on my crown ♪ ♪ I have immortal longings in me ♪ ♪ Now no more ♪ ♪ The juice of Egypt’s grape ♪ ♪ Shall moist this lip ♪ ♪ Yare, yare, good Iras ♪

Q&A and Comments

Right, let’s see what you’ve got to say. Yes, and I’m indeed back in Paris. Very happy to be here. Had a wonderful visit to the flea market, discovered a new artist that I’d not come before. I think a woman artist, but the pictures are not signed with a full signature, just monograms. Maybe I’ll show you some next week. Minutes of silence for the people who tried to search for this song but had no idea what they should type, so they never found it. Saw this comment on a video for Barber’s “Adagio for Strings”. Oh, I’m so glad. Well, I’m surprised you couldn’t find it actually because as I said, it is quite frequently performed, it’s a lovely thing, isn’t it?

Q: Since Leonard Bernstein was a Curtis as well, what was their relationship? A: Well, Bernstein liked his music and performed it quite a lot. But, of course there was an age difference. I don’t think there was close friendship between ‘em as far as I know.

Q: Did he play any instruments? A: I’m not sure about that.

And who played that? I did know that. Margaret. I’d have to look it up again, though I’ve forgotten. It wasn’t somebody very, very famous who played the premier.

And this is Katrine who like me you adore the violin concerto? Yes, I see what you mean about the close mates. It’s got a certain melancholy to it, hasn’t it? Well of course he didn’t actually have any Jewish background. It’s a performance of the first symphony you played at the New York Phil one, conducted, but no it isn’t, it’s a more recent one. I think it’s Marin Aslop, the one I played to you.

Q: Yolande, interesting how he could write such beautiful melodic music and dissonant pieces. Was that the sign of the times? A: Yes, the dissonance, he was actually, I would say, in his time considered a rather conservative composer. And so a lot of people didn’t think it was all that cool to write music that was melodic and not particularly dissonant.

Cheryl, “Adagio for Strings” has become North America’s Semiofficial Music of Mourning used for FDR’s funeral, JFK’s assassination and 9-11. Yes, I can see why Romaine, thank you very much. Mitropoulos, yes, I think he was also gay. I don’t know if he had that kind of relationship, I don’t think with the considerably younger Samuel Barber. Samuel Barber was exceptional for being so harmonious at a time when other composers were testing limits with discord. Yes, you are quite right. And I think there was a certain sort of snobbishness about the fact that he was considered to be old fashioned. Knoxville, 1915. I totally agree with you Linda, although there is a fine version with Leontyne Price but nobody matches Eleanor Stebler for me. She is absolute perfection in that piece. This is Lorna who loves his folks in Martha Graham Valley. Right continued.

Q: On Vanessa, who are the singers? A: The singers in Vanessa. There’s Giorgio Tozzi is the bass, Nikolai Gadda, in one of his absolute best roles as the caddish, cad young lover. So it’s a very, very fine cast all around that recording. Glad you liked that wonderful quintet. He composed the music, but Menotti wrote the libretto for “Vanessa”.

Hi Ron, hope to see you this in the next few days. Yes, Barber and Britten, I suppose when Britten’s Peter Grimes was first performed at the Met, that would’ve been the end of the '40s. It also got quite snobbish comments from the critics. Virgil Thompson, he was very snooty about it as being sort of something that was competent but rather passé. And yes, I’d forgotten it was St. Patrick’s Day. Thank you Rita and thank you, Nikki. South of France is not me. I did one for Martin Randall a couple of years ago and I’m definitely a big city person. I’m not a côte d'azur person. Was commissioned by Koussevitzky to compose a cello concerto dedicated to Raya Garbousova. She premiered the work in Boston 1945. She’s the mother of the violinist, Paul Biss, and a friend of yours, thank you.

This is Ron. James Agee, I dunno anything about him, I’m afraid. Apart from the text of that lovely song cycle. This is not a question. I was Lady Teazel in your school production of “School for Scandal”“ Yes, it would’ve been a bit tough for your school school, wouldn’t it, to produce a full symphony orchestra for that.

Q: Was he jealous of Menotti’s success? A: As I said, they had a very long relationship and I don’t think jealousy was the reason why it came apart at the end. I don’t think Menotti was more successful, really. I mean he had a brief success with those one act early on. But he also had a long period of neglect when he was dismissed by critics.

What small lucking green all over, a leprechaun who recycles, thank you. And this is Sandra. I played the "Adagio” all day when I wasn’t able to watch the horror so much that it soothes the news. Yes, it is a very soothing piece of music. And “Porgy and Bess”. Yes, that is interesting because “Porgy and Bess” was produced in the commercial theatre on Broadway. It wasn’t in initially intended for an opera house, but has been taken up. And you could say “Porgy and Bess” is the great 20th century American opera, but wasn’t initially really intended as such.

Thanks again and see you on Wednesday, bye-Bye.