The American Samuel Barber continued to fly the flag of musical
Romanticism in a century when it was unfashionable. The melodic
appeal and unbridled emotional content of his finest works won
acclaim with concert audiences. But critics were not as
comfortable with him, reacting negatively to the more ambitious
works, particularly the
opera Antony and Cleopatra. Born in Pennsylvania,
Barber's early
musical influences were his aunt and uncle, Louise and Sidney
Homer: she was a famous contralto, he a composer of songs.
Samuel's affinity with the voice showed itself not only in a large
output of vocal music but also in his fine baritone voice. From
1924 to 1932 he studied at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia,
taking lessons in both voice and composition. For a while he even
contemplated a career as a singer, and made a famous and moving
recording of one of his earliest successes, the intensely sombre
setting of Matthew Arnold's poem Dover Beach for voice and
string quartet, written in 1931.
After his graduation Barber won a succession of prizes and
awards which enabled him to travel in Europe, where he forged
important links with Italy. His travelling companion, and lifelong
friend, was fellow student and composer, Gian Carlo Menotti. Works
such as his First symphony (1936) were immediately
performed in Rome as well as New York, and in 1938 the great
Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini premiered what was to become
Barber's popular classic, the Adagio for strings. This
lyrical elegy was arranged from the central movement of his
First string quartet, but the additional richness and
intensity of the orchestral string sound brought it such huge
success that the composer was induced to make a third arrangement of it in 1967, as
a choral "Agnus Dei."
Apart from a brief spell in the United States Air Force from
1943 to 1945, Barber settled down to a steady and often
spectacular compositional career, including such works as the
appealing Violin concerto (1939-40) and the Piano sonata
(1949), the latter commissioned by the legendary pianist
Vladimir Horowitz. The air)' delicacy of its scherzo and audacious
complexity of its final fugue were clearly inspired by his skill.
In the 1950s Barber produced the Hermit songs - settings of
medieval Irish monastic texts, sacred and profane — and in 1957
the opera Vanessa, to a libretto by Menotti. But his
instinctive talent now seemed suffused with effort, and despite
the success of the assertive Piano concerto in 1962, with
its self-conscious adoption of a more contemporary idiom, the
failure of Antony and Cleopatra cast a shadow over Barber's
later years.
Perhaps the best summary of Barber's approach came from the
composer himself in 1971: "It is said that I have no style at all
but that doesn't matter. I just go on doing, as they say, my
thing. I believe this takes a certain courage."
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