Samuel Barber

Samuel Barber (1910–1981) is the composer who wrote the most widely performed piece of American classical music — the Adagio for Strings — and spent much of his career uncertain whether that achievement was a gift or a trap. He was a child prodigy, admitted to the Curtis Institute of Music at 14, and by his twenties was winning the Prix de Rome and writing works that showed complete command of the late Romantic tradition at a moment when European modernism was dismantling it. He chose not to follow.

The Adagio for Strings (1938) began as the slow movement of his String Quartet in B minor. Arturo Toscanini conducted the orchestral arrangement with the NBC Symphony Orchestra, and it was broadcast nationally — the beginning of its extraordinary life as music heard at state funerals, memorials, and moments of collective grief. FDR’s funeral, the Challenger memorial, the response to 9/11: the Adagio keeps appearing when American public life needs to mourn. Barber was ambivalent about its dominance of his legacy.

His Piano Concerto (1962) won the Pulitzer Prize and showed a different Barber — more dissonant, angular, technically demanding. The Violin Concerto (1939) is warmer, closer to his lyric instincts. The song cycles — Knoxville: Summer of 1915 (1947) and the Hermit Songs (1953) — are among the finest American vocal works of the century. He wrote slowly and carefully, and his output is small. Almost everything in it is worth hearing.

StyleAmerican Neo-Romantic. Lyric melody over chromatic harmony. Long singing lines that always find their way to repose. Emotional sincerity without sentimentality.

Listen: Adagio for Strings (Barber himself preferred the choral version, Agnus Dei — try that too). Then Knoxville: Summer of 1915 for soprano and orchestra. Then the Violin Concerto.