Samuel Barber

Samuel Barber ranked among the leading American composers of the mid-20th century and produced substantial scores across virtually every medium, encompassing opera, ballet, vocal, choral, keyboard, chamber, and orchestral forms. His output stands out for its warmly Romantic lyricism, immediately recognizable melodies, and fundamentally conservative harmonic language, qualities that set him apart from the dominant modernist currents of his era.

He belonged to the first entering class at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music. In 1928 the seventeen-year-old Gian Carlo Menotti arrived there to study, and the two established a personal and professional relationship that endured through most of Barber’s career. While still a student he composed several pieces that later entered the standard repertoire, among them the song Dover Beach and the orchestral Overture to The School for Scandal. An accomplished singer and pianist as well as composer, he gave the voice a central role in much of his subsequent work.

Following his graduation from Curtis, Barber completed a string quartet whose slow movement became his best-known composition, the Adagio for Strings. Toscanini conducted the Adagio with the NBC Symphony in 1938, effectively launching the composer’s professional career. His 1939 Violin Concerto further secured his international standing. During the Second World War he served in the Army Air Corps, for which he wrote his Second Symphony. In the ensuing two decades he produced the Capricorn Concerto, a Cello Concerto, a Piano Sonata, Knoxville: Summer of 1915 for voice and orchestra to a text by James Agee, the Hermit Songs for voice and piano on medieval texts, the chamber opera A Hand of Bridge, Medea’s Meditation and Dance of Vengeance drawn from the ballet Cave of the Heart commissioned by Martha Graham, Summer Music for wind quintet, the opera Vanessa, and a Piano Concerto. Leading performers who championed his music included Leontyne Price, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Eleanor Steber, Martina Arroyo, Vladimir Horowitz, Arturo Toscanini, Eugene Ormandy, Bruno Walter, George Szell, and Serge Koussevitzky.

Barber received his first Pulitzer Prize for Vanessa, a Metropolitan Opera commission that premiered in 1958 and was acclaimed as the first great American grand opera. His 1962 Piano Concerto earned him a second Pulitzer Prize. The Metropolitan Opera again commissioned him to compose an opera for the 1966 opening of its new Lincoln Center house; Antony and Cleopatra, with a libretto by Franco Zeffirelli after Shakespeare, failed, owing as much to production shortcomings as to the score itself. The vehemence of the critical reaction left Barber permanently shaken. Already inclined toward melancholy, he fell into clinical depression and, though he continued to write sporadically, produced little further music of consequence.

Notwithstanding the indifference or hostility of critics and academic circles, Barber’s direct and emotionally communicative music retained steady support from concert audiences, and he remains among the most widely recognized and admired American composers. The Adagio for Strings has attained iconic status as a universally recognized expression of grief and stands as enduring proof of his capacity to create music that meets the highest artistic criteria while speaking directly to listeners.