22-06-2025
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.
