The history of the arts is filled with examples of those who expanded the means
of expression. There have, however, been other artists who were content to create
within established means. In music, for example, such composers would include Bach,
Mozart, Mendelssohn and Brahms. Samuel Barber is in this tradition.
Barber's work is widely recognized and accepted as having enriched the literature
of virtually every facet of musical expression. Each piece that he has created
is characterized by deeply felt emotions couched in the sophisticated terms of a
master craftsman. If one were to choose a single word best to describe his art, the
choice would have to be "impeccable." It's not my point to rate composers;
I can't imagine 20th century American music without Samuel Barber. I don't
think you can talk about the heighth of creative ability in this country without
referencing Samuel Barber. To me, he's just one of those orienting composers:
if you're going to study American music, you're going to study
Samuel Barber and his music.
"There is so much to music; it is building up an influence which
no one can measure. To me, all great music is a protest, a revolution against all the
artificiality which surrounds it. When greatness bursts its fetters, then the
world sees something; it may look like a cataclysm, but it may be a destruction
of hypocrisy which binds creativeness and stifles the honest voice."
Music is meant to convey emotion. It can be happy, it can be sarcastic, it can be
melancholy; I'm not sure that most composers set out to convey those
emotions when they put pen to paper. I think what they're looking for is
contrast. Barber's works that are slow and have moments of serene calm and repose
do so in a way that just touches the heart. I loved the music of his that I knew.
I've always associated Sam's music with Plato. In my mind, I think he is a
Platonic composer, in the sense that I feel that all his music has been
written in terms of what Plato called the absolutes, with a faith in the concept
that there is an absolute truth, and an absolute beauty, and an absolute rightness
of things. And it seems to me that all Sam's
music has tried to do that; has tried to form
one version or another of absolute beauty.
Dover Beach is I think one of most
profoundly moving poems I've ever read. The other aspect, of course, is Barber's
setting which would sound somewhat musicological or clinical if you didn't
realize how young he was and how passionate he was about the poem himself.
It belies what I would consider his genius that he found such a profound
essence to the poem in very simple motives, so that you have this
metaphor of the sea of time, and you have this rocking, and unsettledness of water
to this archaic language, referencing archaic mentality, that is as contemporary
as the day it was spoken way back when. And then, starts again: we kind of come
out of the metaphor of water, and really are in the consciousness of life
and love, and passion, respect; to that great release, the highest note in the
whole piece, of love; and the scale down with the first violins, and then back
into that drudgery and motion, as if we never, ever as human beings quite get out
of the useless habits of hatred that we have. I believe like so many that
Dover Beach is one of the most profound statements in music that has come out
of American creativity.
Most people obviously think of the Adagio for Strings
when they think of Samuel Barber. When I think of him,
I think of Dover Beach. If you want to know what melancholy in music sounds
like, it's that. Because that very great setting of Matthew Arnold's poem for
baritone and string quartet is not just a purely musical expression, but it's
text-driven. And it is the great text of the late Victorian period, in which
Arnold sings, if you want to put it that way, of the disintegration of faith, the
disintegration of certainty, the withdrawal like a tide of the belief
that life has meaning and has order. It's going away. And Barber, he didn't
just set that poem for fun. I think quite clearly it was a personal expression for
him, so personal that he sang it, that he made a record of it.
And small wonder that it should be so tremendously powerful of a piece: I think one
of the greatest pieces of vocal music of the 20th
century, maybe it's the best thing he ever wrote.
I never met Samuel Barber. I began my work in 1982 a year after he
died, just one month shy of his 71st birthday. I embarked on this because I was
beginning a doctoral dissertation, and my bottom line was: how come he wrote the
music that he wrote, the kind of music that he wrote? What was it that
influenced him the most? Who and what and how?
The poet Robert Horan observed that almost
everywhere in Barber's work is the sensitive and
penetrating design of melancholy, and perhaps no other work more aptly
expresses this melancholy than Barber's Dover Beach. One wonders what was going
on in this young man's mind as he was selecting the poem and writing about it.
It was written at a time when he was wrestling with self doubts. And what
undoubtedly appealed to him both musically and emotionally were lines, for example,
"The sea of faith was once too at the full, but now I only hear its melancholy, long
withdrawing roar." And yet, the optimism of "a world so various, so beautiful, so new."
But then the pessimism of, "There is neither joy, nor love, nor light, nor
certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain." So, I really believe for him this did
represent a personal statement, and his vulnerability as he stepped out of the
protective cocoon of childhood into the adult world. He was, after all, 21.
I'm Christopher Rex; I'm principal cellist of the Atlanta Symphony
Orchestra. I've been there for over 31 years, and I studied with Orlando Cole
at the Curtis Institute of Music for my undergrad, and then graduate work in
Juilliard with Leonard Rose before getting into the Philadelphia Orchestra
when Eugene Ormandy was there. Ormandy was a fan of Barber, and so when I was
in the Philadelphia Orchestra we did many
times work with Barber, and he would come to
the performances, and he seemed like he was a,
he had a businessman aura around him, rather
than some kind of an artiste, you know, and a little bit of a melancholy businessman
in a way; you know, he seemed a little bit reserved.
It's always interesting to put a composer's output in conjunction with
what he's going through in his life at the time, and often it's just the
opposite of what you think. When you're young, you can feel an intensity and
longing that's really an imaginative one, and
rather than anything you've ever experienced.
Even as little kids we really yearn for certain things, and it should be
that kind of yearning in a nineteen-year-old that he was able to put it down
into music. It's very powerful.
Orlando Cole was a fellow student whom Barber respected highly, and "Landy" as he
was called, it was for him that he wrote the Cello Sonata, and together they
essentially shaped it: not the music, but the technical aspects that Barber
needed to know in order to make it work. So he and Barber actually gave the
first performance with Barber at the piano at Curtis. Barber considered this a student
work, and even in his later years he wasn't terribly fond of the Cello Sonata
for that reason. And he didn't really find what I consider his own voice
which combines the - and this is extremely important in understanding his music - he
was not a "conservative" in the sense of, you know, pulling back: he was more of a
conservator: that is, he used tradition - he melded tradition - with
20th century modernism insofar as it still was tonal, it still allowed for
melody and expressiveness. And that's the key to his music, and why it
will last forever and ever and ever, and even contemporary composers today, of
course - the young crop - are writing tonal music.
The sense of needing to talk about rhythm and melody, singing - you see, that's
where music started, really, right?
I'm Jordan Kuspa, and I'm a composer. The Barber Cello Concerto was the first
piece of music that really got me interested in 20th century music.
I was already composing music by this point; I think I was about 13 years old.
But that was the first real love affair that I had with any
20th century music.
I don't really know what it was about that piece, but there's something that's just
absolutely haunting and gorgeous; particularly the second movement, and I
never found the opportunity as a cellist to play the Concerto, but there's something
of that same quality in the Cello Sonata, which is a piece that I had the
opportunity to learn with Orlando Cole. In 2002 when I was working with him,
Orlando Cole was 95 years old, but boy was he sharp as a tack, and had very, very
precise ideas about how the Sonata should be played.
I think that nowadays it's less what style of music, what language, what
harmonic techniques you write, and more the level of honesty that you're
transmitting. It's a such a difficult thing to put your finger on, but I think
that people respond to a sort of purity of an artistic statement.
It's a great time to be a composer because we have the freedom to do what
we want. And in a way, the legacy of Barber's music is that he was a
composer who essentially said, I will do what I want, and I think that that takes
a certain kind of courage. Through his entire body of work, there is nothing
that feels out of place or forced, and in that sense, while he may have been
writing music that is identifiably related to past modes of expression, in a
way he was his own kind of a maverick, in that he was perfectly willing to go
it alone on this path.
The barber First Symphony has a curious history, because the premiere was in
Italy, and you would have thought that this young composer, this brash Barber,
would have caught on.
He seemed to convey a European sensibility in his music, but by the time we'd
gotten to the mid-1940s and into the '50s, Europeans expected a different kind of
writing from every composer: if you were going to be American, you had to be more
jazz; if you weren't that, you had to be following the lines of the emigres
who came to the United States, writing like Stravinsky or Schoenberg;
Barber was having none of that. "When you were studying in Italy, Mr. Barber,
was your music performed there at all?"
"Yes, as a matter of fact, my First Symphony was premiered in Rome by the
Augusteo Orchestra under Molinari." "How did Italian audiences take to this
new music by an American composer?" "Well, Italian audiences are not used to
hearing much new music, and they're not at all shy about showing their feelings. After
the performance, I went out on stage a couple
of times, and was greeted by about fifty
percent applause, and fifty percent hissing. I remember standing in the wings
wondering whether I was supposed to go out again, and the old doorman said, nuh uh,
better not: the hisses win."
So Barber didn't fit the European mode - it was a frustration for him. I'm very
fortunate now because I do take especially the First Symphony on the
road quite often. It's a remarkable piece; it's 20 minutes long:
the structure is that of a four-movement symphony, although Barber calls it
"Symphony in One Movement." What Barber does is to take basically two different
thematic elements and juggle them over the course of the four movements of the
piece. So the actual material on which it's based is very concise; the
transformations he gives to the melodies are remarkable, and it has a dramatic
impact: it tells this story - in the 20 minutes, he condenses the entire canon
symphonic history into a remarkable piece of music.
My main concern, because I'm not a musicologist - I'm a writer, and I love literature -
so what really interested me in Barber's life was the novelistic quality of his life.
It's drama; there is this incredible succession of success for almost 30
years. Most all of his works are premiered by great musicians, orchestras,
the critics find them wonderful; and then you have the big failure of Antony and
Cleopatra, and after that, those 15 years where Barbara basically struggles to
recover his confidence, to recover his inspiration; and that was the thing that
interested me most. And I was very moved to see this old man trying to do what
was supposed to do the best: that he is writing music despite and still.
I think from the very start - from his very first big-scale symphonic work - he
achieved to write the music he really wanted to write; and I think it's also
one of the reasons why you rarely find in Barber's catalog several works of the
same genre. You have one Piano Concerto, one Cello
Concerto, one Cello Sonata, one String Quartet:
It's because he thinks that all he wanted to say through this
particular measure: the orchestra, the string
quartet, the sonata: he achieved to do what he wanted in one work.
Barber was a masterful orchestrator. Some composers just inherently understand the
orchestra, and that is their instrument. The way
he combines instruments for different colors -
It was clear also that he loved the oboe; I don't know if he had a close
friend that was an oboe player, but almost every major Barber work has a
beautiful oboe solo. He understood the singing quality of the oboe like no
other composer did. But I think that he is like, the only person I can
think of today is John Corigliano who has that same facility with the
orchestra as an instrument. So it's a great joy to conduct his music, because
you don't have to tinker with it too much; you know, it's not a matter of
constantly trying to rebalance things because the composer didn't really do
his job properly: it's just the opposite.
I remember a particularly happy day spent
in the company of Sam Barber; it was a very special day for all of us Americans,
and that was the day of the great ships that arrived in New York Harbor in 1976
around the July 4th weekend. I don't know if that rings any bell, but you might think
back, and in newspapers around the world, it showed this incredible sight of endless
amounts of tall-masted schooners and warships and things from the 19th
century by the hundreds going up the Hudson River - the mouth there, past
the Statue of Liberty and the Twin Towers and all of that. And I do remember everyone
wanted to know what everyone else was going to be doing for that day, I mean,
how the hell are you going to celebrate it? People were saying, oh, newspaper accounts:
Some of the buildings will fall over because they will be packed - everyone
with an apartment on the river will have hundreds of people in each apartment.
So I remember distinctly that day, my brother had set up for me - my brother
Phillip is a member of the club at the top of the World Trade Center - so Sam and
I went down, we set on the 107th floor overlooking the Statue of
Liberty, looking over the ships, drinking champagne.
He said, this to me is like the America of my childhood. We all felt so proud of
Old Glory, you know, and to hear Sam, who was
so urbane, and to a New Yorker's sense very
European, you know, he was just like a kid that day. I'll never forget it: we were
just having a hell of a good time as a bunch of Americans on our 200th birthday
and none of us looked any less for the wear.
In 2001, I was the chief conductor of the BBC Symphony in London. One of the jobs
of the conductor is to do the Last Night of the Proms at the Albert Hall. The
concert was to take place on September 15, and clearly four days before that the
tragedy that was 9/11 struck; and I said that we needed to play the Barber Adagio.
The reason for that is that even though it was not intended as a piece of memorial,
since the time of Roosevelt it's served to be exactly that. For the English it's the
same with the Enigma Variations, the beautiful Nimrod variations is their way of
mourning. Other people use the slow movement
from either the Eroica or Beethoven's Seventh.
Some use the Adagietto from Mahler Five. Here
in the States, when there is some sort of loss,
the Barber Adagio serves that purpose.
Music has that way of somehow unifying people in tragic times. It's sad that the
Barber Adagio has fallen into this category, because in some ways it's a
mournful work, but it's also simply a passionate work of feeling, one of the
most expressive pieces in the entire musical canon.
I try to divorce myself from the extra-musical meaning that some people have
associated; but on that night, on September 15, 2001, there was no getting
around it. And when the performance is over, I'm shattered: I came off the stage
and I collapsed in the dressing room. I still
had to go out and conduct a little more, but it
had truly gotten to me in a way that no other piece of music ever had.
My name is John Corigliano, and I'm a composer, and was a good friend of Sam Barber.
On September 11, my friend Bill Hoffmann called who lives down on Prince Street,
and whose windows overlook the World Trade Center; and of course, stayed
by the television as every other human being did practically all day. And when I
did go out, after the buildings all collapsed,
I walked to Broadway and I saw lines and lines of people walking uptown to their
homes, because there was no subway service, and none of them were talking.
Not a word. Just complete silence. Just the kind of silence you get when you're
really faced with something that's not on a TV or movie screen: the real thing.
It was quite a scene to see hundreds and hundreds of people walking to their
homes without anything they could say to each
other, because there was nothing to be said.
I don't know if music helps; that depends on the person. If the person can be
soothed by music and get out of the state they're in,
that's wonderful. I don't think music would help me in a situation like this.
I didn't listen to music to get myself to feel better. I just sat in my house
here, and wondered what was going to happen next.
My name is Thomas Larson, and I'm the author of "The Saddest Music Ever
Written: The Story of Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings." Barber's true love was
an Italian man named Gian-Carlo Menotti, who would later go on to be a famous
opera composer. The pair met when they were teenagers in the late 1920s at the Curtis
Institute of Music where they were both students in Philadelphia. There's a
famous photograph of Menotti and Barber taken that summer, 1936, in which someone
captured the two of them in this sort of romantic pose: they're standing
side-by-side, and they both have this absolutely divine grin on their
faces. I don't know what they were looking at, but there's this photograph which
captures this sense of elan in their lives. So in the summer of 1936,
Barber and Menotti found themselves in this small town,
St. Wolfgang in Austria. They rented a chalet, overlooking a lake, and that summer
Barber decided to write a string quartet. He knew he'd done something monumental,
because September 19, 1936, he sent a letter to a friend
of his, Orlando Cole, a cellist in the Curtis String Quartet, saying that he had
finished the slow movement of his string quartet. And he used the boxing metaphor
common at the time: he called it a "knockout" - and there is a quality about
the piece that sort of knocks you into an altered state of consciousness, which
I think of as deep grief, because the music has a way of pulling you down into
that, holding you, and then sort of releasing
you from it, that you've done your penance. This is an old, old element of music:
That music through repetition, through a kind of minimalist
focus on a particular emotion, has been sort of absent from Western music for a
few centuries. One of the legacies of Barber's Adagio is that it sort of brought
back this idea: keeping the listener there, you're sort of,
your hands nailed to the cross, as it were, in this piece - is a good thing.
Certainly since the 1970s, composers like John Adams, Philip Glass,
like Henryk Górecki the Polish composer, or Arvo Pärt the Estonian
composer, have all worked with minimal materials to maximize emotion. And this
is in part a legacy of Barber's ability to put the melancholia of his own personality
so deeply and so fixedly into a single piece of music.
I'm gonna be, I'm gonna be at half notes. I'm gonna
be at half notes. And, um, I'm taking on the
slightly, maybe faster side of the Adagio; but I'm thinking, you know, like 80 to the
quarter note; 76, 80, something like that, but I'm definitely beating half notes.
I think when we look at pieces of music that reflect national mourning, you have to
ask yourself one question: if not the Adagio, what piece? I think from what
I know, talking to people who were very close to him, he was bothered that this one
piece had caused so much attention to the detriment of some of the other works.
But in his lifetime, he was a successful composer. You can only count on your
one, maybe half another hand, the Americans who in their lifetimes
as composers achieved that degree of notoriety. And Barber must have felt that.
It's better to be remembered for one piece than none at all.
Our culture does a lot of things well. But one thing we don't do is to grieve
national losses in the kind of depth and with sustained respect that we do when
this music is played. Our monuments to sorrow in our culture are few. Barber's
Adagio is one of them, but there aren't enough. That piece of music is often an
opportunity to remind us that we can grieve as a culture, that we should
grieve. That things like the Iraq War, the Afghanistan War, the Korean War, the
Vietnam War: all of these things have wounded our nation very deeply. And I
don't think we've ever spent enough time grieving the losses that these wars and
their unresolved natures have brought upon us.
It's really well felt. It's believable, you
see; it's not phony, he's not just making it
up because he thinks that would sound well. It seems to come straight from the
heart, to use old-fashioned terms! The sense of continuity, the sense of
steadiness of the flow; the satisfaction of the arch that it creates
from beginning to end makes you believe the sincerity which he obviously put into it.
Well, since I know the Adagio for Strings quite well from the inside, I would propose
to guess at the subject matter: I think it's a love
scene. I think it's a detailed love scene. Bed scene!
So, you make an Agnus Dei out of it, it'll work!
But there's an awful lot of rubbing around!
I never asked Sam, why should I? I could have. But I
don't like to tell people what their music is about.
My name is Jenny Oaks Baker, and I am a concert violinist and a mother.
I recently performed the Barber Violin Concerto with Alexandria Symphony and
other orchestras throughout the country. I've always felt a real affinity to
Barber because he attended the same music school that I went to. We were
both very young when we went to the Curtis Institute of Music, and Curtis
is a really special place - and I can see why Barber is such an amazing composer
because he did have the Curtis experience to draw from.
The Curtis Institute of Music is in Philadelphia.
It's probably the most prestigious music school in the world. If you're able to
get into Curtis, your entire tuition is paid for, so it's very exclusive
and it's a real privilege to be able to go there. When I went to Curtis and I
found out Barber had gone to Curtis, I immediately just had this desire to
play the Concerto, and then I heard it and just fell in love with it.
Curtis is pretty remarkable: they took an old mansion - Mary Louise Curtis
Bok, her father owned the Curtis Publishing Company, and that had the Saturday
Evening Post, and I believe, Ladies Home Journal, and she took this fortune in the
beginning part of the 20th century, and she donated all this money to an
endowment and started a music school for gifted young musicians. And she
purchased this beautiful mansion in the center of Philadelphia, right around
a square called Rittenhouse Square that's just as picturesque a square as you
can imagine, with park benches and a fountain and beautiful trees, and
it's just a really happy little square in Philadelphia.
They converted all the bedrooms into practice spaces and teaching studios and
classrooms, and it's just - you walk in there, and you feel like you're in the
middle of history, and the wood is dark and the fabrics are lush, and it's very -
it's a very welcoming, warm wonderful place, and just walking in there you feel
like an artist. But my first year was a pretty new experience, because I was just
living alone by myself in Philadelphia; I would get there as soon as I
could in the morning, Monday through Saturday, and leave when they closed down:
the security guard came through the practice rooms and locked them all up at
eleven; he would kick me out every single night.
I'm Kim Allen Kluge, music director of the Alexandria
Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D.C.; I am also a composer. I think the fact that
Samuel Barber started his Violin Concerto with the solo violin is
extremely telling. Why? Because the violin amongst we poor instrumentalists, you
know, who don't get to use our voice, probably comes closest to the sound and to the
expressivity of the human voice - which goes to, kind of the heart of a really
powerful Barber trait. To start that concerto with the violin, it's almost
celebrating the vocality of the violin.
That slow movement: I know a lot of commentators make
references to Johannes Brahms; when I listen to that second movement, when I
perform it, I do really feel the spiritual and musical kinship to Brahms
who, like Barber, perhaps was somewhat underappreciated. One of the reasons is
that their emotions, especially when I think of that second movement, there's so
much gravitas: maybe for some people that's too much, it's too much
compression of feeling and emotion! But
oh, when you're open to it, there's nothing like it.
Barber was commissioned to write what he thought was a concertino, actually
he called it that, for Iso Briselli who was a fellow classmate, and Barber worked on
the concerto during the summer of 1939, but in August, all
Americans were forced to leave Europe because of the impending invasion of
Poland by the Nazis. He hoped he could finish the work in France, in
Paris, but of course in September 1939 you don't want to be in France, because
the Germans are coming. And he had to leave France in a hurry; but we could say
that the first two movements of the Violin Concerto have a European flavor, and
yeah, you could hear something like turmoil of these times in Barber's
music. And even if Barber deeply disliked any programmatic connections with his
music, of course the finale of the concerto has something extremely
dramatic, and you can't help to think of the war beginning in Europe.
He brought the two movements of the concerto back, and he showed them to
Briselli in October. He had been working in seclusion, and dealing with his
father's illness at the same time. So in October when he brought them to Briselli,
Briselli liked them very much, but he wanted a third movement and he wanted more
virtuosity in the third movement that would display his ability. So Barber set
out to write it. What Barber didn't know was that the
first performance was scheduled with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia
Orchestra for January. And so, by the time he gave Briselli the last movement of it,
Briselli was able to play it, but he didn't have time to bring it "up to snuff,"
as it were, before that performance. So the two of them agreed that they would
cancel the commission, and somebody else would give the first performance. There's
a lot of mythology that has been created about this third movement; there are
program notes written even today that propagate the fallacy that Briselli was
not able to play it, that Barber wanted to create a movement that he couldn't
play: none of this is true, and the reason I can say that it's not true, is because the
documentary evidence - letters, interviews - that I've conducted prove otherwise.
When Barber was touring Europe with his friend Chuck Turner, the violinist, it was
at the beginning of the 50s, I guess. There were these rehearsals in Paris
before performing the concerto in Germany, and Barber was looking for a
pianist to accompany Turner. And there was this young composer who needed money:
and, what about hiring him for the rehearsal? So Barber agreed, and it was
Pierre Boulez, which is kind of...really funny, and surrealistic at the same time.
And Boulez did the work, and played the piano, and...I would pay big money to have a
recording of his sessions! But the
funny thing of the story is that during the breaks,
Boulez, being Boulez, had this little book note where he wrote for Barber all kinds
of advice on the writing of serial music. So somewhere, there is a book note
by Boulez with advice to Samuel Barber on how to write music a la Schoenberg.
In 1945 Koussevitsky commissioned a work to be performed by Raya Garbousova,
a rather prominent cellist, but because he was concerned about the way the
composition would go, he did something which became a pattern with him for the
rest of his life. He invited Garbousova to come up to Capricorn and play through
her entire repertoire, essentially, so that he could understand what her
talents and predilections were utilizing the whole range of the instrument. And
she was particularly, as she said: everybody thought that the way to break
somebody's heart was to vibrate on the low registers of the cello. But she had
the gift of being able to play in the upper registers with ease, and so that's
why the Cello Concerto has so many difficult passages. It's considered by
virtually every famous cellist to be
one of the most difficult pieces in the literature.
The concerto was well received, and at one point Barber studied
conducting in the effort of recording some of his works, with UK Decca. The
cellist was Zara Nelsova, and there's a funny story that goes along with this.
Nelsova comes in for one of the rehearsals and she starts to play, and the first
cello was so just distraught about how nobody could measure up to her, that he
took his cello and he bashed it, and it
broke into smithereens, and everybody was horrified.
Well it turns out it was a practical joke: he had bought a really cheap cello
and that was just sort of to add some humor to the whole experience.
I remember reading actually in Barbara Heyman's book about the review of the Barber
Cello Concerto, which essentially said: in the coda of the second movement, an
American composer dares to express himself. The idea that it was such an
important thing for an American to be able to write music that was so clearly
from the heart, is what really makes that special.
I think Barber is one of the great composers of melancholic music. You know,
examples: all three of the slow movements of his concerti. The piece that really
got me to love Barber and to love really all of 20th century music,
the piece that opened up that world to me, was the slow movement of the Cello
Concerto. In absolute, sort of blissful agony of melancholy: I mean there's this
opening melody that eventually is transformed from the low register of the
cello, deeply inward and singing, to this extremely high climactic moment that is
absolutely sublime. It's very quiet, and it's sort of reaching to the heavens, and
at the same time it's a very inward gesture. It's a spectacular feat, and it's
something that happens in his music often, and I think that very few
composers have done melancholy as well as Barber.
Well, I had the great privilege of conducting the Philadelphia premiere of
Barber's Cello Concerto at the Curtis Institute, and I was really blown
away that it had never been performed in Philadelphia before. It's an incredible
piece, but it's also a very modernistic piece, and I'm not sure why it hadn't
been performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra, but it's an incredible
piece. But it is also not an easy-access piece like his Adagio.
By all accounts I think Sam Barber was a, he was a reserved person: he didn't wear
his heart on his sleeve, so to speak. Yet in his music I think we can all sense
this intense emotional connection. I think yet at the same time he's always
aware of the classical form and keeping things in check, and in many, many ways
I think because of that his music has greater emotional payoff, because he's
all about pacing, he's all about arrival, architecture - you know, he's a composer
who uses a small amount of material to develop very, very fully and arrive at a
high point in this pieces. Yet at the same time, there's a romantic element
that I absolutely adore. The music for the ballet Medea underwent
many changes from its initial version as Cave of the Heart. Barber worked closely
with Graham who gave him essentially, I won't call it a "libretto," but the
storyline that she wanted to emphasize. And his score got rave reviews, in spite
of the fact that the choreography wasn't really fully developed when they gave
the first performance. And then later, he decided to revise it as an orchestral
suite, and then many years later, maybe a decade later, he revised it into a one-
movement work which I call a tone poem, the work that we know today, and it's
called Medea's Meditation and Dance of Vengeance. And that work, when it was
performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra, Barber measured its success by
how many little white-haired old ladies walked out of the performance in the
middle of it, because it was so radical for him! And the thing that is so really
important about that music is that it shows him developing a step into the
20th century in a way that he hadn't quite done before. There's a lot more
dissonance which is used, again, for the sake of expressiveness. Barber never used
dissonance for its own sake.
You know, I guess I'm of the belief that all music is program music, all
music is narrative. The short, 15-minute Medea's Dance of
Vengeance is really a perfect little piece: it's all about the narrative, of
course, because the story of Medea is so vibrant and violent and brutal. It's very
ominous, it's very unrelenting, and this is Medea's true nature coming out. So she
sets about to kill the woman that Jason has fallen in love with by sending her a
beautiful dress, but it's poisoned: if she puts it on, it will kill her
which indeed happens, and it gets even crazier and crazier because then Medea
decides that it's not enough to kill her. She also is going to kill the children
that she's had with Jason. So it's an extremely emotional, over-the-top, violent
unrelenting piece.
"Tell us a little bit about how you happened to write Knoxville: Summer of 1915.
I see the text is by James Agee. How did
you happen to select it for a musical setting?" / "I had always admired Mr. Agee's
writing, and this prose poem particularly struck me because the summer evening he
describes in his native southern town reminded me so much of similar evenings
when I was a child at home." / "But you're not from Knoxville, are you?" / "No, I lived in
West Chester, Pennsylvania. But I found out after setting this, Mr. Agee and I are
the same age, and the year he described was 1915 when we were both 5."
"I see there's a motto on the score. Let's see, let me read it:
We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennessee, and the time that I
lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child."
"Yes, it seemed to set the mood for the piece. You see, it expresses a child's
feeling of loneliness, wonder, and lack of identity in that marginal world between
twilight and sleep." / "Yes, the very opening lines suggest that mood, don't they? Read
these first few lines here, won't you?" / "It has become that time of evening when
people sit on their porches, rocking gently and talking gently..."
Samuel Barber was born on March 9, 1910 in West Chester, Pennsylvania, a little
town about 30 miles from Philadelphia. His father was a physician and his
mother an amateur pianist. His mother's name was Marguerite, but she was nicknamed
Daisy, which is significant in terms of one of his earliest songs. His sister Sarah
who was younger than he: for Sarah he wrote some of his earliest
songs, and he adored her from the very beginning; he was very close to her.
West Chester was a predominantly Quaker town, conservative by nature, and
Barber attended the public schools there, and he was distinguished by his
classmates: they knew that he was destined for some greatness, that he was
talented in music in particular. And from the time he was eight, he knew he wanted
to be a composer - maybe even younger - but he declared his intentions in a letter
that he wrote to his mother that began something like this: "Dear mother, for some
time I wanted to tell you my worrying secret. I intend to be a composer, and I
will be, I am sure, so please, I beg you, please do not make me go and play
football!" And then he signs, love - and he
underlines love so that there's no confusion, that he's not being critical of his
mother: Sam.
I'm Margaret Chalfant. I've lived in West Chester for the last 75 years. I was
next door to the Barber residence on Church Street. My house was built about
1840. West Chester was a beautiful little college town. It was very friendly, very
open, very trusting. We never locked our doors. We had a
little trolley we called the dinkey that went from the north end of town to the
college in the south end of town. You could get on it anywhere, even in the
middle of the square. If you just signalled to the conductor, I think he knew almost
everyone by name. When you walked uptown you knew almost everybody. And so the
town meant something to you, and if part of the town had something that
happened to it that needed support, the rest of us were there to help.
Daisy Barber had the most beautiful backyard. She had gorgeous roses.
Everything was well-groomed and well taken care of.
She was very, very proud of Sam. And I think her sister Madame Louise Homer, and
probably her husband, had a lot to do with developing Sam's music. My first
introduction to Madame Louise Homer was, I was working in the office
and I heard this gorgeous voice, and I couldn't figure where it was coming from,
and I realized that it was coming in the window right over a window of the Barber
house. So it was Madame Louise Homer singing;
that whole family was singing. She had a beautiful voice.
Aiding and abetting Barber's intentions to be a composer, his ambitions, were his
maternal aunt, his mother's sister Louise
Homer: that is, Louise Beatty who was married to
Sidney Homer, a composer, at the turn of the century, and Louise Homer was one of
the most famous opera singers. She sang with the Met for many years. But Sidney
Homer wrote his wisdom for more than 25 years, encouraged him.
It shaped his aesthetic development, and yet he would not accept complaining.
You know, if Barber was disappointed about something, he would try to buoy his
spirits and encourage him. Here's a quote, for example, from one of
Sidney Homer's letters: "The beautiful thing about art is that quality never
fades out. If it is there, it is there to stay, and that is what makes the effort,
the patience, persistence, infinite care and scrupulous conscientiousness
worthwhile. The intense desire to tell the truth and to create something which
would be an inspiration and incentive to others is what has led to the
heartbreaking, almost appalling labor on the part of those who honestly felt that
they had something to say. Everyone who joins the society in this place pledges
himself to just one thing: sincerity. He tries to put into form his real feelings,
not feelings he wishes he had. Pretense has no place here." And the one thing
Homer kept saying to Barber was, look to your inner self. Sincerity is the most
important word; he uses it over and over again in his letters. And for Barber, even
from his earliest works, the very first piano piece that we have which is called
Sadness, and another one which is a very militaristic war song, he made an effort
to put emotions into music, unlike Stravinsky who believed that it was
impossible to put emotions into music. Barber on the other hand sought to
express emotions, and he did.
Knoxville is like I would sing my own folklore as I do in central Europe or
London or Paris. I would think that Knoxville would affect people that way: It is
an American product of the sort of flavor, the wonder of my country actually,
presented so they could understand it too. It's like a painting, and I think he
said it perfectly. You can hear the streetcar, you can smell the strawberries,
you can...you can feel the sigh of what it is: as always, we southerners would lie on
quilts on the grass at night, to hear all
those strange noises of summer. It's fabulous.
He always mourned his youth and his youthful loves, and he had this strange sort
of desire for some real romantic idea in a certain way. He had this great
sehnsucht for his childhood in West Chester, and he had a great love for
all the countryside around his home in Pennsylvania. The text itself has imagery
that is very familiar to an awful lot of Americans that is going back to a slightly
more innocent America, and days of rocking chairs on front porches, the
trolley screaming on its rails. And I think these are images that evoke
very positive memories, and Barber catches that feeling of recollection
through a kind of gauzy cloud of sweet memory.
"Then the score draws to a quiet close,
and the text is: 'After a little, I am taken in
and put to bed. Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her, and those receive me who
quietly treat me as one familiar and well-beloved in that home. But will not,
oh will not, not now, not ever, but will not ever tell me who I am.'"
My name is Jean-Pierre Marty, and I have happened to have a, I would say, "career" in
the traditional sense of the word, as a pianist and as a conductor. I was to be
one of the great hopes of French piano, and then I happened to develop
problems with my muscular side, and physiological, which somehow ruled out
the idea of the career as such. But when I was active as a pianist, I happened
to fall a little by chance on the sonata of Samuel Barber through the
good offices, could I say, of my teacher Julius Katchen. I said: You are an
American, do you know the American composer Samuel
Barber - whom of course he loved - but that was in the late '40s, you know.
And then years later, I saw on the piano of Julius that very score
which was, you know, lying around with other things, and I said, ah, what's that?
And I said, are we going to play it? And he said, I don't know,
it's very, very difficult - you know, it was written for Horowitz. And as a
young man, I said, well, can I try to play - I mean, you know, can I work on it?
I mean, he said, be my guest - you know, you will see what it is. It is
something! So I took it as a challenge, which you like to do when you are
16 or 17, I must have been at that time. And I said, ah, I'm going
to show him that I can play this - you know, it's not only for Horowitz!
Barber clearly wrote the Sonata with Horowitz in mind. Horowitz was a
frequent visitor to Capricorn, and he wrote the first three movements very quickly.
I mean, he just knew: because Barber as a pianist himself, he knew the piano
inside and out, so he could write for it. But he had a lot of problems with the
last movement. In general, Barber had problems with last movements.
He certainly had the least problems with slow movements, because he could
indulge in the lyricism that was part of his inner life.
The thing about the Sonata was, it had a stunning impact on the musical world.
Everybody was waiting for the great American sonata. Whereas Horowitz gave the
first performance, and had the rights to it for a certain length of time, then
everybody performed it...including my piano teacher, who studied it and
that's when he had a heart attack. He didn't die, but he had a heart attack! And I'm
convinced it was the Barber Sonata that
did it, you know. At any rate...that was Frank
Sheridan, by the way. "One thing I've always wondered, have you ever played your own
Piano Sonata." / "My Sonata?" / "Yes." / "No no no. I can't. I played it for Horowitz
the first time, I played three movements and then I fell on the floor." / "But the Fugue
is a tremendously difficult movement, isn't it?"
"I had to wait for that Fugue quite a while. And Mrs.
Horowitz called me up and said, why don't you get finished with that last movement?
She said, you know what kind of a composer you are, you know what's the
matter with you? And she said in Italian, "tu sei stitico," which translates: you are
constipated. And this annoyed me very much. And then I went into my
studio and composed that Fugue, which has given plenty of pianists trouble.
That was my revenge."
I feel that people have to recognize that he has left not only to
American music but to music of this century some works that I think are
here to stay. One of them, for example, the Piano Sonata. I think it is a great work,
and I don't know of a single piano sonata in the whole of the modern
repertory that has the strength and the power of his Piano Sonata. Take a
look at Samuel Barber's life. For much of it, he is an immensely popular and
successful composer. But he is never,
never fashionable. There was always this sense of
reservation, even among people like Aaron Copland and to a lesser degree Virgil
Thompson who did praise him, but they felt that in some way he was out of
touch with the moment, with contemporary values, with the ethos of the time that
he was working in. Now, that didn't matter a damn to Barber, obviously: he wrote the
music that he wanted to write. But nobody can be looked upon in this way for long
without starting to feel it, and he felt it.
He felt it enough that I think it actually nudged him in the same way that Stravinsky
was nudged after the war into writing music of greater harmonic
complexity, pieces like the Piano Sonata which is in the largest sense a
fundamentally traditional statement. But that's a tough piece of music - tough and
dissonant, and not at all like what you expect when you listen to Adagio for
Strings - and I don't think that he was posturing, I don't think there's anything
false in its toughness. But I certainly think that somewhere in there, he was
thinking something like: Well, I'll show them, I can play that game too.
And of course, he could. This is Barber relating the story of
how he met with Scalero after Scalero studied the Sonata. "Among other things, he
told me he had taken the time to carefully correct all the mistakes
throughout my Piano Sonata, and that it sounds much better now. I felt just as I
did 20 years ago making a violent effort not to show the annoyance coming through
every nook and cranny of my face, even though I saw the funny side. He ended the
session, dear old maestro, with a typically tactful remark: 'You are talented.
Why do you write such bad music? You can do better. Go on, keep working.' And he
vanished into the Milanese fog, looking very old and very far away from the joys
of our atomic world - erect, unbending, dissatisfied." This is all related in a
letter that Barber sent to his uncle Sidney Homer. Sidney Homer, after hearing a
recording of the Sonata, wrote to Barber, "How about a sonata right now full of
peace and happiness, while the iron is hot? Don't you feel the urge?"
The Library of Congress is, you know, the largest public library on the face of
the planet, the greatest public library since the library of Alexandria. For the
American people, they need to know that the Library of Congress is the
largest shoebox of our stuff that was ever built. It's all ours, it's open source, at
the very essence of what that means. It is a glorious collection, and I avail
myself of that. I love this place, I love this building, I love this hall - I think
I'd like to be probably buried in one of these columns here in the Jefferson
Building - only the Jefferson Building, I'm not crazy about Washington, D.C., but
I love this building.
Barber was treated very nicely by Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge who was a friend of
his aunt's, and who thought highly of his music. She commissioned him to write
songs for her birthday party which was an annual event of the Library of
Congress, since she was a big contributor in shaping the Music Division of the
library. His first trip to Ireland, he went to Donegal, and Barber became
aware of these poems written by Irish monks on the edges of manuscripts. Some of
them were rather bawdy, and some of them were concerned with finding solitude,
peace. And he decided to compose the songs
which have become known as the Hermit Songs. Then he was trying to find the right
singer, and he landed of course on the young Leontyne Price. Beginning in those
early days in the '50s, I was a very devoted friend of Sam, as I called him
affectionately, which I think is a very important special marriage - and I had that
with Sam. There was an invitation in Washington, D.C. to do a premiere with him
of the Hermit Songs, and we did it - and it was a premiere which is
catalogued in the Library of Congress as really, you know, the first
performances, with great success. This is a sketchbook that I looked at when I first
began my work on Samuel Barber. It is at the Library of Congress, and this is sort of
where it all began for me. I went through every page: he had identified some of
these sketches, but when I got to the last page in particular, there was a
quotation that just blew me away. And it's a quotation, the words of Franz
Liszt from - I tracked it down - "Memoirs of a
Bachelor Musician - and this is the quote, in Barber's handwriting: "There is a
degree of innovation beyond which one does not pass without danger.
Lamartine had the gift of seizing the exact point of permissible innovation."
When I read this, I had an epiphany: And I said, oh my god, this is Samuel Barber's
credo: he used modernist language insofar as it did not compromise melody, lyricism
and tonality. And that put a perspective on him in terms of his aesthetic principles.
These songs, I think, they bring together two elements: one, his love of
Irish literature - but the themes themselves resonated with him. And you
know, I feel the more I live with Barber - or cohabitate with him, as my
kids say, the more I realize that the texts that he chooses are usually
biographically pointed. And I always observe this with the songs he wrote at the
end of his life, Despite and Still in particular, because they reflect really
this quest for inner peace that could
only be obtained in a rural, cloistered setting.
I think that Sam Barber is our Monet; I said that several times in an interview,
and he loved it. He's an art impressionist.
By that I thought of some of the blues and the
reds of Monet as well - particularly the blues.
There must be, what, 1,000 kinds of blue in Monet. And the mixture of things: that
each color itself comes very strong at you, not like the sharp steeliness of a
Van Gogh, but the lusciousness and the fluidity - that's what I think of
Sam's music. I just think he's one of the great composers of our time.
I was at the first performance of the Hermit Songs. Sam played the piano and
Leontyne Price sang them, and that was one of the great experiences that I recall
hearing music. And of course those songs I think are extraordinary;
I think they've held up very, very well.
As you've just heard us play this, we are interested to know if, as you've
heard it, if that represents pretty much what you had intended. "Oh yes. I think it's
an excellent performance, very good indeed. I'm glad you kept the tempo moving
because it's a piece with a good deal of slow music in it - it's a summer piece, the
feeling of summer, but it mustn't be too lethargic, in fact it
mustn't be lethargic at all - it must keep moving,
and you did. I noticed you put on a [trill] at the end of the bassoon part: where
did that come from?" Well, we have the original parts from the
Detroit group that first performed it; Charlie the bassoonist told us about it,
and I kind of like the first idea you had there.
"I like it too. It's not here but it's alright!" Someone writing about your music says
that Samuel Barber always uses wind instruments in an idiomatic way. But it
always requires the greatest virtuosity, and now I know what they mean! "And I have
them, I have all the virtuosos here today, so I've been very lucky.
I like to develop - why not? - the instruments, and call for its...and ask for
its maximum potentialty." Well, I was going to say that your treatment of
the winds is such that the parts are
extremely difficult to play, they require an awful
lot of woodshedding; so many composers write things that are extremely difficult and
impossible, but I must say that's
not the case with your music. Well, Sam, it's certainly
been wonderful to have you here, and I know that everybody's going to enjoy
Summer Music. And I think that your contribution is one of the greatest, and we
want to thank you from the bottom of our hearts. "Thank you very much, thank you."
I'm not one of these conductors who is into opera the same way others are;
I didn't grow up in a background which had stage in my blood. But I find myself
drawn to the operas where there's stronger musical intent. Vanessa per se
as a drama - it's a little slow, not much happens - five people, and it's sort of a
static work dramatically. But the music makes this an extraordinary opera. We
were all convinced by the time we'd done it that we would spur all kinds of
revivals of the work, and that hasn't quite happened yet, but it should, because this
is an opera that holds its own virtually with any opera in the 20th century.
It's got great arias, it has that fantastic
quintet in the last act, it has a wonderful interlude in it.
Everybody gets something to do. Barber was invited actually by the Met
to write an opera many years before he actually wrote Vanessa. His quest for
the right libretto went back as far as 1934 when he wrote to Scalero that he
was anxious to attempt an opera on an American libretto. Then there were
interruptions because of the war; he had thought maybe Dylan Thomas, Tennessee
Williams, Stephen Spender, the list goes on and on and on. But he knew that he needed
an original libretto, and finally he writes to his Uncle Sidney, "You'll never
guess who agreed to do it." Of course, Gian-Carlo. Menotti wrote into
the libretto many, many allusions to Barber's preferences: French food, ice
skating, Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard which was one of Barber's favorite plays.
There was a true collaboration here. Menotti who wrote the libretto does
believe that Vanessa was more like Sam, and Anatole, I guess, more like him.
Sam/Vanessa was the romantic, the dreamer. Then of course he had to find the right
singer for the role of Vanessa. He started with Maria Callas, who came to
visit him at Capricorn, bringing her little dog with her, and she apparently
decided not to do it, probably because she noticed that the
role of Erika would upstage her. And lo and behold, Eleanor Steber stepped in,
learned the part in record time, and she
said, "Vanessa was my role - I lived her life! I know about Anatole!" That's what
she told me anyway. He added certain things at the last minute.
Rosalind Elias, who played the young Erika, was very upset that she didn't
have an aria - everybody else had an aria - and
for her, he wrote very quickly the song Must the Winter Come So Soon, which is
surely one of the most beautiful arias in the opera. It really could serve as a
stand-alone art song.
A great event happened in 1960 when the Academy of Music, this
fabulous concert hall, home of the world-renowned Philadelphia Orchestra,
received a brand new pipe organ by the legendary firm Aeolian-Skinner. This organ
was given by Mary Curtis Bok, and to celebrate this occasion she commissioned
Samuel Barber to write Toccata Festiva. Now, what brings it so close to me is the
fact that Samuel Barber knew there was one organist and only one organist that
could pull off his vision for this piece, and that was Paul Callaway, my
predecessor at the Cathedral Choral Society. Paul Callaway was the organist/
choirmaster at the Washington National Cathedral; he knew his way around one of
the largest organs in the world. So this friendship that started out between the
two inspired, I know, Barber to dare to write whatever his fertile imagination
would create. Every stop, you know, Barber needed to know just what that
could or couldn't do in the combinations,
and I think it's one of the most - other than just the piece orchestrally,
but then you add the organ and you add particularly the cadenza played by the
feet alone, which was very audacious - it's something that in my opinion in the
repertoire of organ concertos stands by itself.
Being out here in this beautiful setting, this sylvan setting, it's hard not to
understand how a composer could be inspired to greatness, to beauty, to
all kinds of things. And I'm fascinated with the effect that it had on
Barber when he was no longer able to live here at Capricorn in this beautiful
setting, and move back into the city. It almost created, if you will, kind of like
"writers block": that's not to say that composers can't work, and often do, under
great hardship - they hardly have this type of setting to inspire
them. So it's in their mind and their heart and their soul, but if you
have the added stimulation of a setting like this, you're fortunate indeed - and
we're fortunate, because precious, priceless, timeless music was created
right here in Capricorn.
Capricorn was a curious house because we wanted something that had two
very separate wings, and our studios would
be far enough from each other so we couldn't
hear each other, and compose. But at that time we were just out of Curtis;
it was difficult for us to move there and to buy it and so on, but
with the help of friends, we were able to buy the house. And it became a quite famous
house because practically all of New York intellectuals came through Capricorn
one time or another: not only musicians, but many writers and painters; people
that you would never think would be our friends, like Duchamp and Andy Warhol!
It took me a long time to have had good relations with Barber,
and I'm glad it was going from bad to good than the reverse. And of
course at Capricorn, I would visit rather regularly, and when I was invited
for Christmas - of course, they received tons of Christmas cards, at
the time when Christmas cards existed - and
there, each year, made a competition: which
was the worst, the most awful card that they
would have received, which was rather indicative: it
was not of the most beautiful; it was the worst! So that shows that they were
kind of bitchy, you'd say. Okay; so they had already selected - so we'll ask
Jean-Pierre what he thinks. And it was a card that John Corigliano had sent -
he was young, a young man at the time;
I don't know if he had drawn it himself, or a friend -
anyway, it showed...it was a diptych with Jesus Christ whipping deer, you know,
and Santa Claus nailed on the cross.
That was that. So, what do you think, Jean-Pierre?
What could I say? To be very honest, I don't follow your...it's a
fact that Christmas is an ambivalent feast, and it's also a pagan feast which
has nothing to do with it, and the two are mixed, and often the church complains...
In other words, I was not horrified. And that stirred up a very hot
discussion. I mean, I remember I said, I'm sure Nadia Boulanger would have been
shocked, I said that - that probably was the wrong thing to say, because Nadia
was of course "La bon chrétien," and of course that would have been unthinkable
for her, but I said: at Capricorn, you know, you should be a little more
broad-minded and all that. And Barber said, "Well I think we should stop this
discussion, after all this is a Christian house!" I still hear him. And it left, you
know, I mean, and then it just went from bad to worse at the time, that I said to
Gian-Carlo, I'm going home. And he said, "well, you know, he's in a bad mood,
you are not the first to have that - please, bambino..." That is the truth,
and John Corigliano, I don't know if he knows that I took his defense
with great, great gusto!
What kind of relationship did Barber and Menotti have? This is a puzzling
question, because we really don't quite know. Were they monogamous? Turns out
they weren't. Did they stray from one another as a matter of course? It's hard
to tell. Part of the reason is the sort of fluidity of musicians, composers, dancers,
theatre directors and so on that worked together at this time. It's hard to
say exactly how open or closed these relationships were. I think the one thing
we know is that these men came together artistically first. So on one level this
collaboration, this musical artistic love sort of didn't die, because both men seemed
to be renewed in their personal lives by taking new lovers. And yet, they
continued to live together at the house, in Capricorn, in Mount Kisco; they
continued to work and travel together. They continued to collaborate on these works.
He wouldn't have liked even being called gay.
But he was perfectly proud of his friends who were, like Menotti,
especially the successful ones. And he had one way of behaving,
you know, in what you might call society; and then he had another way of behaving
with, say, young male friends. I think he thought of himself and his private life as
a gentleman first of all, and that rather old-fashioned way that
people had of being gay. I think it's gone out of style now, maybe.
But it never did with Sam. In fact I remember him saying to me not too long
before he died, well who would ever know I
was homosexual? And I said, well, Sam, do you
think everyone you know is going to keep quiet about it?
I talked to Gian-Carlo about this after Sam's death, and
he said, he kept saying, well, we just couldn't get along. Things were... Maybe two
composers - you know, like two pianists: very dangerous.
I think in some ways there may have been some envy, because Gian-Carlo was a
theatre person. I've always wondered if
Gian-Carlo just couldn't handle that. And then of course,
we can't get away from the fact that, the Schippers relationship - again, it
all started a long time before I even knew Sam, and I think they just gradually
started going on the rocks. I think Gian-Carlo was always more
interested in younger men. I don't think Sam cared, really.
He was attracted by them, but I think he would have been more than happy to...
he was truly...he was married to Gian-Carlo,
there's absolutely no question about it -
he was married. I don't think Gian-Carlo felt quite
the same thing. But I don't think that we'll ever know the whole story.
Antony and Cleopatra was Barber's favorite Shakespearean play, and when you
read the lines, I can understand why. It is a passionate play about love,
impossible love essentially, and Barber's score is much more intimate
than the production. Everything that could have gone wrong
went wrong, and Barber was very, very upset. "With the stage sets of Antony
and Cleopatra, I was not very happy. There was sort of a great number of
things going on on the stage; it was hard to
hear the music - I think Leontyne Price told me she held onto her wig and
decided it was either the opera or herself, or the music, I forget which
it was; she was very gallant about that. And I did not...I thought that was
mistreated by the man who did the sets, who shall be nameless."
Sam was talked into using Zeffirelli by the management of the Met, which was a
great mistake. And of course at that time, Zeffirelli was very chic - but as
Suso d'Amico in Rome used to say, Zeffirelli is extremely good with the 13th
production of Rigoletto or something, but he really cannot do an original production.
The first night itself, I can testify, was
not a very, very exciting experience for me, to have a 3-minute cue, and I was
locked into the pyramid after the first aria - in the pitch dark! - because something
mechanical didn't open up at the right
time. But I must say, there's no business like showbiz;
I simply kept singing the thing, in the pyramid! I'll be heard no matter what!
I remember hearing the premiere broadcast of Anthony and
Cleopatra on the radio, the Met Saturday broadcast, and even have a tape of it.
I was enchanted; I was absolutely drawn into it as a listener. Now, we all know that
the stage didn't function properly, and it was a social gathering: people were
not ready for quite a long evening in the theatre; what was it, one critic said
that in-between intermissions they performed Antony and Cleopatra.
The audience clapped and clapped and clapped. He was brought to the stage over and
over and over again. That premiere performance was received with great
glory. Bing had every intention of performing it again; there are letters to
prove that. But it kept getting delayed, and the work that should have been the
highest point of his career turned out to be his nemesis. The viciousness, really
venal quality of those reviews: they were waiting to get him, and they did.
And the terrible thing is that when it was played at Juilliard several
years later, everybody who went, knew that we had seen a great opera. The problem was
it was staged in such an enormously "Cirque du Soleil" fashion that you really
didn't hear the music. And it was so bad that he said to me, "I see no reason to
write anymore; I don't - if people don't want me to write, I won't write." And he
wrote very little after that. He did write one cantata, some piano pieces, a
movement of an oboe concerto - but no one expected this. One could expect a bad
review, or negative things in a review, but not this huge onslaught. And he was a
different man after that; he was not happy. He moved. But, it wasn't there.
Wasn't there. And how much we lost because of that is a real shame, because Sam
still had in him great, great music to write, but we'll never know what that is.
The last years of Barber's life were basically years without Menotti. Menotti moved
to Yester House in Scotland, and he asked Barber to sell Capricorn. And after
Antony and Cleopatra's failure, that was a real blow to him, because Capricorn was
the place where Barber wanted to be, and wanted, I guess, to die, to spend his
last days. But he had to sell it, he had to move back to New York, and he was not
comfortable in big cities. He writes something in a letter that he is a boy
from the country, and he doesn't want to live in big buildings in
New York. So even in a wonderful location like Manhattan's Fifth Avenue, he wasn't
comfortable, he was sad, and he was alone.
You know, his musical loves changed from age to age, and he
started with Brahms, then he went through a certain influence of Sibelius, and then
at the end, the last years, he played only Bach,
only Bach. He had bought the Gesellschaft, and that was his great love, and
when he sat at the piano, it was always to play some Bach.
I don't think he was very, that interested actually in orchestrating. I don't feel
Sam's soul in the style of orchestration. But at the same time, he often
said the color of the orchestra doesn't really interest me that much, because I
feel that the valid musical values should remain the same, it doesn't matter
what instrument you use - the orchestra in a hundred years will be a completely
different kind of orchestra, and then what? What will happen to all those wonderful
little sounds of Debussy and Ravel and so on?
He always said, Bach, look at Bach: you play Bach on the harmonica, or you play it on
the guitar, or on the organ: it's always wonderful.
I'm fascinated with how important Bach was to Barber. There is a wonderful
integrity to the structure of his writing - he doesn't waste notes. And it
also transcends normal formality and formalism; I mean, in the same way that
people who don't understand Bach, they think of him as this, again,
traditionalist, this old-fashioned guy, but he knew and could write in all
the styles - in any of the styles - whenever
he cared to. Towards the end of his life, when that's all he played, when he
would go to Bach like you go to the Bible, is because Bach
is apart from everything else: in the sense that it's something eternal.
It's something...it's an eternal truth. It's nice to have a few mysteries in
life, and when you approach death, when you're at the end, you know, you think
about a lot of things; but that composer and that music and that person,
I think of it like a god. I mean, just something that has been with
you on one level all through your life, and will be with you in the life to come.
My name is Calvin Bowman, and I'm an Australian composer. I've loved
Bach since my teenage years, and at that point
I began to play the organ, and started to explore the big preludes and fugues, the
passacaglias and the big choral preludes. In 2009,
I played all the Bach organ works at once. So, for 17 hours, I sat and played
Bach non-stop, virtually. It was what I would describe as a transcendental
experience, and it was as though I could see the inner workings of the universe
as I was playing. And I guess throughout his life, Sam Barber turned to that music
in order to make sense of his existence, especially in times of crisis.
And in the end, turning to Bach in that way was something akin to a religious
experience for him. I'm not what I'd describe as a sad person,
but there's a deeply felt melancholy within my
soul, and that all comes out in my music. And Sam Barber inspires me to do that.
And in some ways, by listening to his music
and studying his music, I know it's safe to do so. He says to me, it's alright to be
lyrical, and it's alright for you to explore
the recesses of your heart. And sometimes
those places are a little sadder, but there's beauty to be found in those recesses.
So, for many years I've been collecting Barber memorabilia. In my collection I have
various manuscript drafts, I have signed scores, and this obsession has
culminated in the purchase of his childhood Steinway.
More by good luck than design, I came across
Sam Barber's childhood Steinway - No. 220601 -
for which he wrote a piece called To My Steinway. So clearly, it's a piano that he
loved very much, even at that tender age. Unfortunately, it was in fairly
deplorable condition, so what we're doing is we're saving Barber's Steinway. So it's
currently being fully restored, and it's going to be a piano that I can use once
it has been fully restored; it can't be a museum piece for me, it needs to be
something that I can compose and work upon.
My name is Melissa Fogarty. I'm a soprano. I've been living with
Samuel Barber songs for 20 years, and I just made a recording of 23 of his songs
and it's called Despite and Still.
I actually started singing professionally at age 11, and had a very
charmed life around that, singing solo children's roles at the Met, at City Opera,
Sarasota Opera; it was a dream childhood, in
that regard. In the late aughts, I really started to gain some success and
credibility and notoriety as an artist in New York City.
And then it started to dry up. And so the question was, well what now? Should I
go back to school, do something else?
Is there really any point in auditioning in the incredible
competition? And...the answer is, yes, there is. But how about doing your
own thing, just going with your own gut, and not really worrying about, you know,
getting into this opera or whatever. But it's not easy. And so Despite and Still
resonated with me: in particular, the first song, which is actually called the
Last Song, taken from the poem A Last Poem, in which the poet Robert Graves says,
"A last song, and a very last, and yet another - O, when shall I give over?" And
to me, I think he's saying, do I keep writing, or in this instance do I keep singing?
Do I have anything else to say as an artist? Is there anyone listening?
Does anyone care? Why am I doing this? And also, Despite
and Still: to me, that's the answer to the question. It's the last piece of the
cycle, and I think it more has to do with a struggling relationship. One thing I
think is really beautiful, and I wrote it in my program notes, is that he died in
Menotti's arms. So even though they separated, they still had that
connection. And how could they not? They stayed together for decades. So even
though things didn't work out, I think deep down they still deeply loved each other.
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