This minute-and-a-half gem has an ecstatic tilt. Schirmer, wrote an insightful remembrance of his friend. It is the one universal aspect of his style, and it shows up in every compositional period. Critics universally mark this. Musicians tell me that without the lyric strain, there is no Barber, or, at least, what there is, is second rate. His fast movements often sound generic, even showy. Barber was perennially dissatisfied with his finales.
He revised them again and again, never raising them up to his standard. His adagios, however, as we shall see with his most famous one, landed on his doorstep temperamentally whole. Consider his lyric record. In two hundred published and unpublished works that Barber wrote during his fifty-plus composing years—from , age 17, until , age 68, three years before his death—roughly half are art songs, choral pieces, song cycles, and opera.
Heyman lists eighty-eight stand-alone songs. Almost all these pieces possess soulful, meditative, haunting melodies. I do both. They are precisely notated and predictably irregular. Barber loves to state a simple melody. But right away he alters that simplicity by stretching or shortening the phrase. The melody, thrown off balance, is freed from any boxy cast and our expectation of where it should go.
The singing Barber used rubato a good deal. Instead, he notates his wandering or elongating rhythms exactingly. Whether he uses a modal, tonal, bi-tonal, chromatic, or dissonant harmonic language—at times he builds chords on fourths or else stacks neighboring triads—he does so to bring a lulling comfort or sudden severity to the melodic-rhythmic suppleness I note above.
When scoring, his orchestration is often more transparent than rich. But is the sorrow native as well? Is it possible that in the same way Barber was tendered his melodic facility he was also given an acute sensitivity to pain?
Could he have expressed such sadness in music without having lived it? Barber never had a regular job, either to earn extra money or to further his professional career. Unlike most composers, he did nothing but compose: no writing besides the letters; no lectures; a few recitals when young; a handful of conducting gigs, one at Curtis with the Madrigal Chorus, for which he studied even in middle age; two years teaching orchestration at Curtis, which he later said he hated.
All he wanted was to write music, and he had the financial means and talent to do so unmolested. And yet something in Barber was calling out to be heard.
In it, he emphasizes the mournful mood with a chromatic, near atonal melody and a repetitious accompaniment in the strings that feels trapped, even feverish. Gone is the meter of the verse. In its place is a mini-oratorio, with cold statement and sudden flights of dramatic lyricism. But Barber provides it. In the summer of , a photograph was taken of Barber and Menotti in St. Wolfgang, Austria, where Barber and Menotti resided in a chalet in which he wrote the Adagio later that year.
In it, we see the two side by side in profile, matching smiles and sprightly gazes. Their youthful vigor is irrepressible. But wait. Barber is about to pen the saddest music ever written. Some think that while young he managed his melancholia, that is, kept it hidden, especially as his career got off to such a promising start, with financial awards and premieres, trips to Europe and paid-for villas where he could compose.
Others say that his sadness has much to do with hiding his homosexuality: he could never quite be himself around others, so he withdrew or was defensive, except in his music. Again, the music provided an out.
While he wrote in a late-Romantic style, more Italianate than American, he sounded out of sorts with his rough-hewn brethren who, in the s, styled a new music with nationalistic, atonal, or jazz elements. Barber did use atonal elements but his method was additive, not structural. I agree with those who knew Barber long term: his personality was woe-ridden from birth. I find it remarkable that he was given this calling, which, like Orpheus, he could neither escape nor tamp down.
He became more comfortable with his calling, but not until he had written many highly expressive pieces, among them Dover Beach , and not until he adapted to the grievous feelings his musical talent was directing him. He probably knew his melancholy was progressive. He may have felt it would neutralize him unless he gave in. Thus, he poured himself into composition, writing a lyrical music ever more complicated by his dread of what he would become.
It took time for him to discover just how inalienable the trait of melancholy was in him. In , the radio program, BBC Today , began a competition to find the saddest music in the world.
After receiving more than four hundred nominations, they listed the top five on a website for voting. Other critics, however, felt Downes had overrated it. One cannot even pick one passage over another, any more than you can say one point makes the beauty of an arch. This is a masterpiece. In , when President Franklin Roosevelt died, radio stations of that day sought out appropriate music to use for national grieving, as all regular programming had stopped.
Roosevelt in Washington, D. Einstein, the brilliant theoretical physicist, was also a lover of classical music, and Kelly, an American Hollywood actress before becoming Princess of Monaco, had a tragic death in an automobile accident at age Her televised funeral was attended by Hollywood stars and royalty from around the world. She died in September of leukemia. In , Samuel Barber arranged his famous adagio for eight-part choir, in Agnus Dei Lamb of God , a one-movement a cappella choral composition set to the Latin words of the latter part of the Mass.
Agnes Dei was written for mixed chorus with optional organ or piano. The music, in B-flat minor, has a duration of about eight minutes. And its trademark, even for the casual listener, is its emotional power. A few even find it celebratory at its climax.
It sounds heavy and bleak, yet somehow enlightening, glorious… It almost needs a whole new adjective? Click for DVD. In The Elephant Man film, the story focuses on the life and struggles of John Merrick, who is so deformed he wears a hood in public to hide his face. Still assumed to be ignorant, and viewed as repulsive by hospital staff, Merrick at one point astonishes Treves and the hospital administrator by reciting the 23rd Psalm from memory.
Turns out that Merrick is quite articulate and intelligent. Although bound mostly to his hospital room, Merrick occasionally dines with Treves and his family and later receives high society guests, including the famed actress Madge Kendal, played by Anne Bancroft. At one point, Merrick is kidnapped by his former side show manager and put back in the freak show business in Europe, before he is rescued by Dr.
Treves and returned to his hospital room. There he mostly reads and works on building a scale-model of a cathedral he can see from his hospital window. Near the end of the film Mrs. Kendal has arranged a special evening for Merrick — an evening at the musical theater, attending in white tie and seated in the Royal Box. At the conclusion of the production that evening, Mrs. Kendal takes to the stage after the final curtain and announces to the entire audience that she and the musical company have dedicated the evening to a lover of the theater, Mr.
John Merrick, motioning to him in the Royal Box. And with that, the entire house breaks into applause. As Merrick stands to acknowledge the recognition, the house audience then rises in a standing ovation for Merrick.
Later that night, back at his room, Merrick thanks Dr. Treves for all he has done, and then prepares to retire. He then begins to prepare himself for bed, though this time, removing the pillows that have allowed him to sleep in an upright position so he will not die from the weight of his head.
Click for book. Its elegiac descent is among the most moving expressions of grief in any art. The snail-like tempo, the constrained melodic line, its rise and fall, the periodic rests, the harmonic repetition, the harmonic color, the uphill slog, the climactic moment of its peaked eruption — all are crafted together into one magnificent effect: listeners, weeping in anguish, bear the glory and gravity of their grief. The composer also arranged a choral version of the work, the Agnus Dei, in See more Barber Music.
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