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Samuel Barber
1910-1981
Samuel Barber was the most naturally gifted American composer of his generation.
Life and Music
- Barber produced a series of scores that helped fill the emotional void left by such radical figures as John Cage.
- Barber’s American musical accent had more of a European flavour, yet he never felt entirely comfortable in the public eye, and suffered periods of agonising self-doubt.
- Aged only 10 he wrote a short opera entitled The Rose, and within two years was holding down a part-time $100-a-month organist’s post at Westminster Church in his home town of West Chester, Pennsylvania.
- At 14 he became one of the first pupils at the new Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.
- In 1928 he won Columbia University’s Bearns Prize for his Violin Sonata.
- Barber was again awarded the Bearns Prize of $1,200 in 1933 for his precociously accomplished orchestral overture, The School for Scandal.
- He won a Pulitzer Fellowship and the American Prix de Rome in quick succession, and during his stay in the Italian capital in 1935 he composed the work that consolidated his early reputation: the (first) Symphony in One Movement.
- The Molto adagio second movement was destined to become Barber’s most celebrated work, the Adagio for Strings, arranged for string orchestra at the request of the conductor Arturo Toscanini.
- Professionally, the war years were unremarkable. During 1939 Barber returned to the Curtis Institute, this time as a member of staff lecturing on orchestration and composition. He stayed there for three dull years, and then in 1942 joined the Army Air Corps.
- Barber won a second Pulitzer Prize in 1962 for his masterly Piano Concerto, yet despite a certain popular acclaim and scholastic recognition, he had come to feel increasingly divorced from his era.
- When his opera Antony and Cleopatra officially opened the New Metropolitan Opera House in September 1966, the critical mauling the work received – mostly to do with Franco Zeffirelli’s production rather than the music itself – virtually finished him.
- Barber retired to the Italian Alps and turned in on himself. Struggling both with depression and alcoholism he composed almost nothing for six years and then produced two scores in quick succession – a solo piano Ballade (1977), and a Third Essay for Orchestra (1978) – that are only occasionally illuminated by the full brightness of Barber’s creative flame.
- Barber died a broken man on 23 January 1981 and was buried next to his mother at Oaklands Cemetery in West Chester.
Did you know?
During his studentship at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, Barber began developing his baritone voice, which can still be heard on a landmark recording of his glorious song cycle, Dover Beach.
