Samuel Barber
Samuel Osmond Barber II was an American composer, pianist, conductor, baritone, and music educator, and one of the most celebrated composers of the mid-20th century. Principally influenced by nine years' composition studies with Rosario Scalero at the Curtis Institute and more than 25 years' study with his uncle, the composer Sidney Homer, Barber's music usually eschewed the experimental trends of musical modernism in favor of traditional 19th-century harmonic language and formal structure embracing lyricism and emotional expression. However, he adopted elements of modernism after 1940 in some of his compositions, such as an increased use of dissonance and chromaticism in the Cello Concerto and Medea's Dance of Vengeance ; and the use of tonal ambiguity and a narrow use of serialism in his Piano Sonata, Prayers of Kierkegaard, and Nocturne.
Barber was adept at both instrumental and vocal music. His works became successful on the international stage and many of his compositions enjoyed rapid adoption into the classical performance canon. In particular, his Adagio for Strings has earned a permanent place in the orchestral concert repertory, as has that work's adaptation for chorus, Agnus Dei. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Music twice: for his opera Vanessa, and for the Concerto for Piano and Orchestra. Also widely performed is his Knoxville: Summer of 1915, a setting for soprano and orchestra of a prose text by James Agee. At the time of Barber's death, nearly all of his compositions had been recorded. Many of his compositions were commissioned or first performed by such noted groups and artists as the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Opera, Vladimir Horowitz, Eleanor Steber, Raya Garbousova, John Browning, Leontyne Price, Pierre Bernac, Francis Poulenc, and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.
While Barber composed a significant body of purely instrumental music, two-thirds of his compositional output were art songs for voice and piano, choral music, and songs for voice and orchestra. Some of his most frequently performed songs include both the solo voice and choral versions of Sure on this shining night with text by Agee, and the song cycle Hermit Songs, with anonymous texts by Irish monks from the eighth through thirteenth centuries. This emphasis on sung material was rooted in his own brief career as a professional baritone in his 20s which inspired a lifelong love of vocal music. In 1935, Barber recorded his own setting of Arnold's "Dover Beach" for NBC, singing the vocal part accompanied by string quartet, and he was also featured weekly on NBC Radio in 1935–1936 performing German lieder and art songs. He also occasionally conducted performances and recordings of his works with symphony orchestras during the 1950s, and taught composition at the Curtis Institute from 1939 to 1942.
Barber was in a relationship with the composer Gian Carlo Menotti for more than 40 years. They lived at Capricorn, a house just north of New York City, where they frequently hosted parties with academic and music luminaries. Menotti was Barber's librettist for two of his three operas. When the relationship ended in 1970, they remained close friends until Barber's death from cancer in 1981.
Biography
Childhood (1910–1923)
Barber was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania, the son of Marguerite McLeod and Samuel Le Roy Barber. He was born into a comfortable, educated, social, and distinguished American family. His father was a physician; his mother was a pianist of English-Scottish-Irish descent whose family had lived in the United States since the time of the American Revolutionary War. His maternal aunt, Louise Homer, was a leading contralto at the Metropolitan Opera; his uncle, Sidney Homer, was a composer of American art songs. Louise Homer is known to have influenced Barber's interest in voice. Through his aunt, Barber was introduced to many great singers and songs. Sidney Homer mentored Barber for more than 25 years, and profoundly influenced his compositional aesthetics.A child prodigy, Barber became profoundly interested in music at a very young age, and it was apparent that he had great musical talent and ability. He began studying the piano at the age of six and at age seven composed his first work, Sadness, a 23-measure solo piano piece in C minor. Despite Barber's interest in music, his family wanted him to become a typical extroverted, athletic American boy. This meant, in particular, they encouraged his playing football. However, Barber was in no way a typical boy, and at the age of nine he wrote to his mother:
At the age of 10, Barber wrote his first operetta, The Rose Tree, to a libretto by the family's cook. At the age of 12, he became an organist at a local church.
Education and early career (1924–1941)
As a young boy, Barber took private lessons from William Hatton Green. Constant Vauclain, one of Barber's peers, described Green being one of Barber's greatest early influences. At the age of 14, Barber entered the youth artist program at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where he ultimately spent ten years developing his talents as a triple prodigy in composition, voice, and piano. During his initial studies at Curtis, he simultaneously attended and graduated from West Chester High School, during which time he composed his school's alma mater, which remains in use. Following his graduation from high school in 1928, he entered the adult professional program at Curtis from which he graduated in 1934. At Curtis he studied piano with George Frederick Boyle and Isabelle Vengerova, composition with Rosario Scalero, conducting with Fritz Reiner, and voice with Emilio de Gogorza. In 1928, he met fellow Curtis schoolmate Gian Carlo Menotti, who became his partner in life as well as in their shared profession. During his last year at Curtis he became a favorite of the conservatory's founder, Mary Louise Curtis Bok. It was through Mrs. Bok that Barber was introduced to his lifelong publishers, the Schirmer family.From his early adulthood, Barber wrote a flurry of successful compositions, launching him into the spotlight of the classical music world. According to Walter Simmons, Barber's earlier compositions contain certain characteristics that directly relate to the "childhood" period of his composition, extending to 1942. The use of tonal harmony, unresolved dissonance, moderate chromaticism, and largely diatonic, lyrical melodies are some of the defining features of this period in his compositional career. At the age of 18, he won the Joseph H. Bearns Prize from Columbia University for his violin sonata. He won the Bearns Prize a second time for his first large-scale orchestral work, an overture to The School for Scandal, which was composed in 1931 when he was 21 years old. It premiered successfully two years later in a performance given by the Philadelphia Orchestra under the direction of conductor Alexander Smallens.
While a student at Curtis, Barber also pursued other music development opportunities as well as personal interests through travels in Europe; mainly in the summer months when school was not in session but also sometimes for longer periods. His first European trip began in the summer of 1928 in which he visited Paris, Brittany, and Italy with cellist and composer David Freed. He continued to travel in Europe in the fall of 1928 without Freed to other European cities in Czechoslovakia, Germany, Switzerland, and Austria; during which time he first visited the city of Vienna which would later become an important city in his musical development. During this first stay in Vienna in 1928 he formed a friendship with composer George Antheil.
Barber returned to Italy in the summer of 1929 using funds he received upon winning the Bearns Prize; this time with Menotti as his travel companion. He returned to Paris in the summer of 1930, and in the summers of 1931 and 1933 both Barber and Menotti studied composition with Rosario Scalero in Montestrutto, Turin while staying with Menotti's parents in Cadegliano. After winning the Bearns Prize a second time in April 1933, he extended his stay in Europe beyond the summer of that year to pursue further studies in Vienna; staying in that city in the autumn of 1933 into the early part of 1934. During this period his studies were mainly focused on developing his talents as a vocalist with the intent of pursuing a career as a baritone. He also studied conducting independently during this period; making his professional conducting debut in Vienna on January 4, 1934. In March 1934 he returned to Philadelphia to finish his studies at Curtis.
After graduating from Curtis in the spring of 1934, Barber pursued further studies in conducting and singing with John Braun in Vienna in the summers of 1935 and 1936 through the aid of a Pulitzer traveling scholarship. He soon after was awarded the Rome Prize which enabled him to pursue further studies at the American Academy in Rome from 1935 to 1937. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1946 and also studied conducting privately with George Szell.
In his early career Barber had a brief career as a professional baritone, performing on the NBC Music Guild concert series and earning a weekly contract on NBC radio in 1935. Musicologist wrote that Barber's recording of his own setting of Arnold's "Dover Beach" was hailed as having "singular charm and beauty, intelligently sung by a naturally beautiful voice". First-hand experience as a singer and an intuitive empathy with the voice would find expression in the large legacy of songs that occupy some two-thirds of his output.
Barber's first orchestral work to receive international attention was his Symphony in One Movement which he wrote while studying composition in Rome. The work was premiered by the Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome under the baton of Bernardino Molinari in December 1936, and was soon after programmed by symphony orchestras in New York City and Cleveland. The work was the first symphonic composition created by an American to appear at the Salzburg Festival, where it was performed in 1937.
In 1938, when Barber was 28, his Adagio for Strings was performed by the NBC Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Arturo Toscanini, along with his first Essay for Orchestra. The Adagio had been arranged from the slow movement of Barber's String Quartet, Op. 11. Toscanini had rarely performed music by American composers before. At the end of the first rehearsal of the piece, Toscanini remarked, "Semplice e bella". From 1939 to 1942, Barber taught composition at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia.
During this time, there was a major turning point in Barber's music. In 1940, he wrote a choral piece using Stephen Spender's war poem, "A Stopwatch and an Ordnance Map". From this point forward, World War II caused his second phase of composing. This new phase was greatly influenced by other composers such as Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Bartók, and genres such as jazz. His new era of composition would feature a greater involvement in American literature and culture.