Barber: Adagio for Strings

Adagio for Strings

Samuel Barber
(1910-1981)

Samuel; Barber was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania, raised in comfortable circumstances, with everything life could bestow upon a young man blessed with rare artistic gifts and great luck. The family was artistically inclined: his uncle Sidney Homer was a noted song composer, Aunt Louise Homer was a celebrated contralto at the Metropolitan in the days of Enrico Caruso. Barber entered the Curtis Institute at age fourteen, a member of its first class, making a name for himself with a setting of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” scored for baritone and string quartet. Passing through Philadelphia Ralph Vaughan Williams happened to hear the work and commended the twenty year-old composer, admitting that “for years I have tried to set that poem without success. You have done it!” At age 26 Barber composed his First Symphony, which was immediately introduced by Bruno Walter. A string quartet soon followed, with a remarkable slow movement which caught the attention of Arturo Toscanini, who urged Barber to prepare an arrangement for string orchestra. Soon recorded, the Adagio for Strings won overnight fame for Samuel Barber, becoming perhaps the most widely performed concert work ever written by an American. An unbroken string of successes continued, among them a symphony commissioned by the U. S. Air Force after Barber was drafted into the armed forces in World War II, a piano sonata composed for Horowitz; the opera Vanessa was written for the Metropolitan Opera; a brilliant Piano Concerto written for the newly opened Lincoln Center, which won the Pulitzer Prize. Then came a fiasco: a stellar, over-produced, over-hyped version of Shakespeare’s “Antony and Cleopatra” became the operatic equivalent of the sinking of the Titanic. This shocking failure left Barber a shaken, bitter man. Never again did he recover his self-confidence, never again did he know popular success.

Set in the darkly-coloured key of B-flat minor, the Adagio for strings opens with a long-breathing melody unfolded in the violins against a subdued sustained harmonic background. The listener is unlikely to be aware of meter or rhythm, so predominant is the gentle melismatic flow of songful melody. (On the printed page the music is laid out in subtly shifting time signatures, the music moving according to the vocal nature of the melodic element---the phrases themselves are punctuated by veritable “pauses for breath.”) At first never rising above an elegiac tone, the opening music is given to the 'celli in a second section, now pressing upward into the violins, and rising to a climax of passionate intensity. This is suddenly broken off. Out of the silence a succession of solemn chords in the lower strings lead in the final segment, in which the melody is now played by violins and violas in octaves, taking on a consolatory tone as the music comes to rest on a hushed F Major cadence.

In recent times the Barber Adagio has endured all sorts of manipulations in films and solemn occasions, sometimes threatening to rob the music of its honest expression and essential poignancy.

Interestingly, the composer himself prepared a choral version of the work, set to the text of the Agnus Dei from the Latin Mass.