Latest news with #SamuelBarber
Telegraph
22-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
While his friends played sport, this 10-year-old wrote an operetta – now he's one of the greats
Samuel Barber was a genius, and a prodigy. At nine years old, he told his mother he did not want to be an athlete – the favoured outcome for upper-middle-class American boys of his generation, en route to a job in one of the professions and marriage – but, rather, a composer. Luckily, his parents agreed. The following year, 1920, he wrote an operetta. Two years later, he was a church organist. By the mid-1930s, in his 20s, despite a brief spell as a professional baritone, he was writing music that went straight into the repertoire of American orchestras, and then into concert programmes around the world. He made several visits to Europe, studying in Vienna, Turin and Rome. To his instinctive voice these studies added polish, but they did not divert Barber from his idea of music: something that spoke directly to his audience. At his death in 1981, he was one of America's, and the world's, most renowned composers. He remains famous for two works in particular: his Adagio for Strings, of 1936, developed from his string quartet of the same year; and Knoxville: Summer of 1915, for soprano and orchestra, from 1947. He has been recorded extensively: yet, as is often the case for composers celebrated for one or two popular works, many other pieces are overlooked, of which a few, in the estimation of some critics, are superior to those that are well-known. Barber came heavily under the influence of his maternal uncle, Sidney Homer Sr, far less well-known than his nephew, but regarded by the cognoscenti as one of the finest American composers of art songs. For the best part of 25 years – the formative phase of Barber's career – he studied with his uncle, and his style of composition owes much to him. Barber's writing is characterised by its lyricism, warmth and colour. As he became older, there was the occasional injection of modernism, but he was so adept at writing highly originally in traditional forms that experiments with extensive dissonance were not required. He was not afraid to seduce his listeners with beautiful tunes and phrases, but in doing so expressed nothing derivative or hackneyed. He is always an original, strong voice. The Adagio and Knoxville exemplify this. The latter is a setting of a text by James Agee, a native of Knoxville, Tennessee now recognised as one of America's most noted writers and poets of the 1930s and 1940s. The work is usually sung by a soprano but can be performed by a tenor. Its words are those of the small boy Agee was in 1915; the year before his father was killed in a car crash, and his blissful childhood came abruptly to an end. The writing is, appropriately, wistful and nostalgic, at different times warm and reflective. The work, like the Adagio, deserves its fame, and Barber was so motivated by his subject that it took him only a few days to write it. But there is so much more to Barber: two symphonies, from 1936 and 1944, the second withdrawn, revised and republished after his death; three operas, written in the 1950s and 1960s; concerti for violin, cello and piano, and an unfinished oboe concerto; much choral music and song; and much chamber music, as well as solo works for piano and organ. He showed his orchestral brilliance with his first major work: his 1931 overture to The School for Scandal, which has some echoes of his near-contemporary William Walton. Unlike Walton, Barber was no enfant terrible, and more given to introspection. This comes across in his three Essays for Orchestra, written in 1938, 1942 and 1978 respectively; and although the composer claimed that the third, composed after so long an interval, was less lyrical and more abstract than its predecessors, it bears great similarities to them. For me, the Second Essay is Barber's absolute masterpiece. It is 11 minutes long, but the composer packs so much in that, as one critic put it, it feels like a symphony. Its initial moodiness grips the listener from the start, but then the work expands into the turbulent, the majestic and the beautiful. Listeners will also suspect that every composer asked to write music for an epic Hollywood film for the next 10 or 15 years was influenced by it to some extent. There are two stunning recordings: Leonard Slatkin and the St Louis Symphony, on EMI, and Marin Alsop and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, on Naxos. If new listeners to Barber start with this work, it is likely to lead to a musical journey of some significance.
Times
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Antony and Cleopatra review — Shakespeare meets Hollywood at the Met
When the new Metropolitan Opera House opened in 1966, Samuel Barber's lavish Antony and Cleopatra was a flop. A new attempt at adapting Shakespeare's play into operatic form might seem foolhardy, but the composer John Adams has never shied away from a challenge. Over the years, his collaborations with the director Peter Sellars have taken on pressing political issues, from the Cold War diplomacy of Nixon in China to Oppenheimer's bomb in Doctor Atomic. Antony and Cleopatra is Adams's first opera without Sellars, and shorn of Sellars' eccentrically brilliant way with text and stage, runs the risk of becoming a conventional grand opera. A co-commission from Met, San Francisco, and Barcelona, it has been tightened up dramatically since its premiere in 2022. Yet much
New York Times
17-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Why Is an Entire Age of American Opera Missing at the Met?
'Vanessa' had the kind of pedigree you rarely see in a world premiere at the Metropolitan Opera. Samuel Barber, who was already famous for his Adagio for Strings, composed the score. Gian Carlo Menotti, his partner and an experienced hand at opera, wrote the libretto and directed. Cecil Beaton, mere weeks from winning his first Academy Award, designed the production. Dimitri Mitropoulos, the house's leading maestro, conducted. On opening night, in January 1958, audience members sounded pleased during the intermission, according to a report. There were 17 curtain calls. The next day, Howard Taubman wrote in The New York Times that 'Vanessa' was 'the best American opera ever presented' at the Met. It would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize for music. The opera was revived the next season, and again in 1965, when a critic wrote that it 'deserves to be kept in the repertory.' Instead, it disappeared from the Met. 'Vanessa' has survived, to be sure. The aria 'Must the winter come so soon?' is a staple of recitals and competitions. Conservatories and small companies stage productions; a 'reimagined' version by Heartbeat Opera is coming to the Williamstown Theater Festival this summer. Why, then, is it impossible to see 'Vanessa' at an opera house like the Met? That's a question with deeper implications: If one of the finest, most enduring American works of the mid-20th century can't make it to the grandest stage in the country, what hope is there for others from its time? 'Vanessa' represents a period in American opera history in which Barber and his peers, most of them gay, were creating a style that would become known in the popular imagination as 'American' sound: a plain-spokenness that folded well-known songs and folk melodies into a middlebrow classical idiom. The absence of 'Vanessa' on the Met's stage, and on others in New York, is more upsetting when you hear a persuasive argument for its vitality, like the one made recently at the Kennedy Center, with the National Symphony Orchestra presenting 'Vanessa' in concert. (Not long after, the center was in upheaval.) There, the opera received the kind of top-shelf treatment it had at its premiere: Its hit aria was sung with plush sincerity by the mezzo-soprano J'Nai Bridges; smaller roles like the Baroness and the Doctor were taken on by the veteran stars Susan Graham and Thomas Hampson; the players were led by Gianandrea Noseda, a conductor with a gift for shaping dramatic scores with a broad view that pays off by the opera's climactic quintet, 'To leave, to break.' That moment comes near the end of the opera, a brisk two of hours of plot in which Vanessa and Erika, involved in a love triangle with the uncanny Anatol, hold on to idealism and delusion to the point of regret and self-sabotage. The quintet builds to a declaration of Barber's respect for the art form's traditions; its woven melodies are like loose strands from 'Fidelio' and 'Der Rosenkavalier.' Which is fitting for a composer who, even when developing a homegrown idiom of his own, was criticized for sounding too European. If 'Vanessa' has a continental accent, Barber's style is only part of the reason. His collaborator, after all, was Menotti, an Italian-born composer and librettist brought up on operas at La Scala in Milan. (In the 1950s, it wasn't unusual for newspapers to refer to them as 'close friends.') Together they decided to set the story in a Scandinavian country house rather than, say, an old upstate New York mansion like the one they lived in. There was even a moment when the title role could have gone to a star with one foot in America and the other in Europe: Maria Callas. As Howard Pollack recounts in 'Samuel Barber: His Life and Legacy,' Callas visited Barber and Menotti's home, with her husband and her miniature poodle, to hear Barber play and sing through the score. She complained that 'Vanessa' had no melodies, and that, in any case, 'I could never fall in love with a man who had already made love with my mezzo-soprano!' (She was also unsure about the prospect of singing in English, despite having been born in New York. Barber quipped: 'A graduate of Public School No. 102 decided she did not know English well enough to attempt singing in that language.') Without Callas's celebrity, there was still much anticipation for the opera's debut. The Met hadn't premiered an American opera in more than two decades; the only contemporary work it had presented in the five years before 'Vanessa' was Stravinsky's 'The Rake's Progress.' Over a month before opening night, Esquire magazine published the entire libretto. That 'Vanessa' had such a high-profile premiere, on no less than the Met stage, was all the more remarkable because it wasn't even a given for new operas to premiere in opera houses. It was just as common, in the 1940s and '50s, for them to open on Broadway. In the 1930s, the Gershwins' 'Porgy and Bess' started at what is now the Neil Simon Theater, today home of the Michael Jackson jukebox musical 'MJ'; Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein's 'Four Saints in Three Acts' opened on 44th Street. Other works followed suit: Broadway theaters housed Kurt Weill and Langston Hughes's 'Street Scene,' Marc Blitzstein's 'Regina,' even Menotti's Pulitzer Prize-winning 'The Consul.' Some operas were first presented outside New York or at universities, like Bernstein's 'Trouble in Tahiti,' Carlisle Floyd's 'Susannah,' and Douglas Moore and John La Touche's 'The Ballad of Baby Doe.' Often, those would end up onstage at New York City Opera, a haven of American opera in its best years and the company that premiered Aaron Copland and Horace Everett's 'The Tender Land.' When operas opened on Broadway, they were under enormous commercial pressures and typically struggled to find a sustained audience. Routinely, they were appraised by theater rather than music critics. 'Regina,' an adaptation of Lillian Hellman's 'The Little Foxes,' received cool notices from theater critics, then dramatically more positive ones from opera critics who tried to save it. These works are by no means perfect, but they are too well crafted for their legacies to have either suffered or stagnated as much as they have since the mid-20th century. 'The Tender Land' may be unsalvageable, and 'Antony and Cleopatra,' Barber's 1966 follow-up to 'Vanessa,' wasn't viable until it was heavily revised in the '70s. But works like 'Street Scene' and 'Regina,' which combine masterly, melting-pot scores with quintessentially American themes, dramatize the soul of a nation. You're unlikely to see either at the Met any time soon. When Opera Theater of St. Louis mounted 'Regina' in 2018, starring Graham, I asked Peter Gelb, the Met's general manager, what was keeping his house from staging it or a more sure hit like 'Vanessa.' He said, 'It makes sense for the Met to produce them only if we can cast them with big singers, with promotional force.' When 'Susannah' finally arrived at the Met in 1999, for example, it was with Renée Fleming in the title role. The cast of 'Vanessa' at the Kennedy Center was made up of singers who are either established or rising stars of the Met. Schedules allowing, they could be transplanted to Lincoln Center with ease. So what's the holdup? In recent seasons, the Met has become interested in American operas, but only those written by living composers. It has commissioned new works and revived ones from recent decades, like Jake Heggie's 'Dead Man Walking' and, next month, his adaptation of 'Moby-Dick.' The goal, Gelb wrote last fall, is to program 'operas with rich melodic scores and contemporary story lines.' You could use the same words to sell virtually any opera from the age of 'Vanessa.'
Washington Post
31-01-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
In the hands of Noseda and the NSO, ‘Vanessa' is better late than ever
Before maestro Gianandrea Noseda sent the National Symphony Orchestra whirling into its dazzling performance of Samuel Barber's ″Vanessa' on Thursday night at the Kennedy Center, he led the audience into a stretch of complete silence. 'There are moments when it's difficult to find the words,' he said from the stage, 'so I think music will serve this purpose.'
