Barber Adagio for Strings

Adagio for Strings (1937)

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. He was a member of the first class in the newly-opened Curtis Institute at age fourteen, making a name for himself with a setting of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach, ” a work for baritone and string quartet which he himself recorded as vocal soloist. The Overture to “A School for Scandal, ” written as a graduation composition, brought wider recognition, and the First Symphony, written at age 26, was introduced by Bruno Walter. A year later the slow movement of his First String Quartet came to the attention of Arturo Toscanini, who urged Barber to prepare a version for string orchestra. Toscanini’s recording of the “Adagio for Strings” brought overnight fame, the composition becoming perhaps the most widely performed concert work ever written by an American.

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. 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 (most memorably in Oliver Stone’s “Platoon”), sometimes threatening the rob the music of its honest expression and poignancy. Interestingly, the composer himself prepared a choral version of the work, set to the text of the Agnus Dei from the Latin Mass.

NCO Concert