Samuel Barber

Samuel Barber was born on 9 March 1910 in West Chester, a small town in Pennsylvania, into a comfortable, cultured family. His father was a doctor, and his aunt, Louise Homer, was a famous contralto at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, married to the song composer Sidney Homer, who became a valued adviser to young Samuel. He began piano at six and composed his first piece at seven. At nine he wrote his mother a now-famous letter: “I was not meant to be an athlete. I was meant to be a composer, and will be I’m sure.”

At ten he was already trying to write an opera. At twelve he became organist of a church in his town. In 1924, aged fourteen, he entered the brand-new Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, studying composition, piano and singing at once; he had a fine baritone voice. There he met the young Italian composer Gian Carlo Menotti, who became his partner for more than forty years and the librettist of his operas. Together they often travelled to Europe, especially Italy and Austria.

Barber made his mark early. In 1931, still a student, he composed the overture The School for Scandal, after an eighteenth-century English comedy, full of wit and verve. He sang himself and in 1935 recorded Dover Beach for voice and string quartet. That same year he won the American Prix de Rome, which allowed him to stay at the American Academy in Rome. There he composed his Symphony No. 1 and his String Quartet Op. 11.

In 1936 he composed the Quartet Op. 11, whose intensely melancholy slow movement was to have an extraordinary destiny. At the request of the famous conductor Arturo Toscanini he made a version for string orchestra: the Adagio for Strings. Toscanini premiered it on 5 November 1938 on an NBC radio broadcast heard by millions. The work became one of the most famous in American music. It was broadcast on the radio when the deaths of Franklin Roosevelt and later John F. Kennedy were announced, and has been used in many films. Barber also made a choral version, the Agnus Dei (1967).

In 1939 he composed his Violin Concerto, originally commissioned for a young violinist who found the finale too difficult. During the Second World War he served in the Army Air Forces, which commissioned a symphony from him. In 1947 he composed Knoxville: Summer of 1915, on a text by James Agee, for soprano and orchestra: a tender, nostalgic memory of a summer evening with family, seen through a child’s eyes. He also wrote a Piano Sonata (1949), premiered by Vladimir Horowitz.

With Menotti he lived at Capricorn, a house in Mount Kisco near New York, where they entertained many artists. Menotti wrote the libretto for his opera Vanessa, premiered at the Metropolitan Opera in 1958, which won him his first Pulitzer Prize. In 1963 his Piano Concerto, premiered by John Browning, won him a second Pulitzer. Barber wrote in a lyrical, Romantic style devoted to melody, at a time when many composers preferred the avant-garde.

In 1966 his opera Antony and Cleopatra, after Shakespeare, was chosen to open the new Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center in New York. But the staging, too heavy and complicated, was a resounding failure. Deeply hurt by the critics, Barber went through a period of depression and composed less. He separated from Menotti in the early 1970s. Suffering from cancer, he died in New York on 23 January 1981. His Adagio remains one of the most moving and most performed pieces of the twentieth century.