A Fanfare for Samuel Barber
by David Patrick Stearns
DECEMBER 14, 2010 TAGS:
Rarely do great composers reach a creative summit so decisively and publically as did Samuel Barber, only to be perceived as making the blunder of a lifetime. Barber started at the top, surpassed his early promise but then fell far and hard. A classic case of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s claim that there are no second acts in American lives? In this centennial year of Barber’s birth, his story is being reshaped and even reversed. Over his 71 years (1910-1980), the composer did deliver a second act, on the very day, Sept. 16, 1966, that many consider to be the date of his professional demise.
Was the world deaf? Music once perceived as 50 years behind the times now seems to have been written 40 years too early. Same notes, opposite impressions. What was once considered irrelevant is now influential. Revisionism is common in classical music, but in this case, the composer’s public fall turns out to have preceded a creative decline.
The first half of Barber’s life was beyond charmed. Growing up amid wealthy gentility of West Chester, Pa., Barber knew from boyhood he was destined to be a composer. He enrolled at the Curtis Institute of Music, and wrote his greatest hit, the now-ubiquitous Adagio for Strings, at age 26. Premiered two years later by the greatest conductor of the era, Arturo Toscanini, Adagio was broadcast on NBC radio and established the composer immediately. Since then, it’s been featured in so many films it’s hard to imagine the world without it. In his personal life, Barber was happily ensconced with the dashing Italian composer Gian Carlo Menotti, whom he met as a fellow student at Curtis.
What a power couple! Menotti’s first opera was performed at La Scala, and he went on to introduce millions of Americans to opera on TV (Amahl and the Night Visitors) and Broadway (The Saint of Bleecker Street). Critics may have been ambivalent about the populist Menotti, but not about his more cultured partner. Barber came later to opera – and enjoyed success in more august venues -- with Vanessa, premiered in 1958 at the Metropolitan Opera with a Menotti libretto. Their Mt. Kisco, N.Y., home was the scene of fabulous, even legendary social gatherings (though Tallulah Bankhead so intimidated Barber that he locked himself in his bathroom).
Artistically, Barber triumphed in one genre after another. He won the Pulitzer Prize for both Vanessa and his 1962 Piano Concerto. His Piano Sonata was premiered by Vladimir Horowitz. And then? The normally witty, congenial Barber became unaccountably difficult. A mere autograph request could inspire a tactless rant. Though Menotti moved on – still a close friend, still eager to collaborate – Barber cloistered himself to create perhaps the most visible commission in the history of American opera: a work for the grand opening of the Metropolitan Opera house in Lincoln Center. The subject was monumental – an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra – with a fail-safe creative team including director Franco Zeffirelli and soprano Leontyne Price. The opening, however, was the most notorious premiere since The Rite of Spring.
Despite opening night snafus – Price, for example, became trapped in the pyramid from which she was meant to emerge -- the audience cheered. Within days, though, that appreciation changed. European critics in town to cover the grand opening damned the opera with condescension and faint praise. Barber didn’t know of the reception until after his departure by boat for Italy.
*
Even among his contemporaries - such as Aaron Copland, who created musical Americana with the use of folk songs, and Leonard Bernstein, who integrated jazz elements into symphonies and Broadway musicals - Barber was seen as the Europe-influenced holdover, long after Europe abandoned what Barber drew from it. He looked backward with yearning and nostalgia. His Violin Concerto begins with a slow, meditative song for violin and orchestra, yet with none of the usual competition between the two entities. The second movement is even more introspective, like a confession, and the final movement shows off the violin in typical European concerto style. Barber's Knoxville Summer of 1915 sets to music James Agee's prose description of a Victorian-era summer evening, seen through the loving eyes of a child. And, of course, Adagio for Strings, with its magically ascending three-note motif, rises to heaven – but never gains entrance.
When Americans followed and eventually one-upped Europeans in the realm of musical experimentation, throughout the 1950s Barber was composing on borrowed time. He was a dinosaur – albeit a beloved one - but remained a moving target, jumping from genre to genre so that few were able to follow his creative evolution toward Antony and Cleopatra. The martial brass writing in the 1954 choral work Prayers of Kierkegaard morphed into the militaristic fanfares of Egypt and Rome, while the lean, often percussive, mythology-based Andromeda's Farewell prepared him to portray Shakespeare's characters as something more than operatic warblers. The lyricism of Vanessa was loosened up, even unraveled, to accommodate more the complicated figures in Antony and Cleopatra. No doubt the Met crowd was expecting Vanessa. The symphonic crowd, which might have known Andromeda's Farewell, would have shunned the opera once it was designated a flop. And the choral crowd probably couldn’t afford tickets to either symphony or opera. Anyone expecting a movie-goddess Cleopatra would have been taken aback by Barber’s demanding, imperious version -- more Margaret Thatcher than Elizabeth Taylor. The great love story between Cleopatra and Marc Antony was as political as it was romantic. No wonder Barber wrote for the gutteral lower reaches of Leontyne Price's register and made Marc Antony a bass rather than a more lyrical baritone. More heretically still, he skipped the standard operatic love duet.
Heard in a live recording of its opening night performance, Antony and Cleopatra comes off as a tough, tight masterpiece. But with the overblown and distracting Zeffirelli production, could anyone hear the music? Photos of the work resemble a Hollywood biblical epic, a genre then in disfavor. At 56, Barber experienced his first failure. Judging his work harshly, he suppressed almost half his output, including his Symphony No. 2. And like Caesar, he had assassins close by: Zeffirelli later admitted he overproduced the opera because he didn't entirely believe in it. The Met's artistic director Rudolf Bing was similarly unconvinced, and canceled the planned revival. The composer just stayed in Italy – for five years.
By the time Barber returned to Antony and Cleopatra in 1974 for a thorough reshaping, under Menotti’s guidance, he was struggling with alcoholism. He gamely described the revision as “less Rome, more Egypt” and added a superb love duet. It was re-premiered at the Juilliard School, recorded at Menotti’s Festival of Two Worlds, and televised by Lyric Opera of Chicago in the 1990s. Nobody disliked it. But the opera always seems a tad remote and curiously subdued. Then you return to the live Metropolitan Opera recording of the world premiere, conducted by the magnetic Thomas Schippers, and realize “Ah, that’s it!” Barber got it right the first time.
During this period Barber composed a choral/orchestral setting of Pablo Neruda poems titled The Lovers, premiered in Philadelphia in 1971 and reprised the following season. But it appears to have made little lasting impression. Yet hearing the piece today – it’s harmonically intoxicating, and unique among the composer’s works - one wonders if Barber could’ve written The Messiah and not have it be noticed. Copland, Bernstein and Menotti were also falling from grace, though not as badly as Barber. Copland stopped composing after 1967. Menotti wrote music into the 1980s though his hits all hailed from the 1950s. Bernstein tried Broadway one last time in 1976 with the unsuccessful 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, wrote plenty of excellent music after that but generally had to conduct it himself for it to be performed. He died in 1990, dreaming of a Holocaust opera he never even began. Barber didn’t have a conducting career to keep his works before the public. He ended up rewriting Adagio for Strings as a choral work, which must’ve seemed like a desperate bid for attention.
By the 1980s, the avant garde movement wore out its limited public. Influences from Bernstein and Copland began echoing through the works of young composers such as Aaron Jay Kernis, Richard Danielpour and Jennifer Higdon. Now, the solidity and unshakable purpose of Barber may make him the most influential of them all. Higdon’s Violin Concerto, which won the Pulitzer Prize this year, would never have been written with such melodic and harmonic appeal without the precedent of Barber’s work in the same medium. In opera, Barber has inspired composers such as Jake Heggie and Mark Adamo. Had Barber’s final years unfolded in a more receptive era, might he have been shipped off to the Betty Ford Center and then come back to write more masterpieces? It’s possible. But the reality of his final years is sad. A year before he died, Barber formally retired from composing. I had occasion to ask him why. His reply: “I want to take up something interesting, like deep sea diving.” The nonchalance was astonishing. But the suggestion that he had come to place so little value on his creative gifts was tragic.
David Patrick Stearns is classical music critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Was the world deaf? Music once perceived as 50 years behind the times now seems to have been written 40 years too early. Same notes, opposite impressions. What was once considered irrelevant is now influential. Revisionism is common in classical music, but in this case, the composer’s public fall turns out to have preceded a creative decline. The first half of Barber’s life was beyond charmed. Growing up amid wealthy gentility of West Chester, Pa., Barber knew from boyhood he was destined to be a composer. He enrolled at the Curtis Institute of Music, and wrote his greatest hit, the now-ubiquitous Adagio for Strings, at age 26. Premiered two years later by the greatest conductor of the era, Arturo Toscanini, Adagio was broadcast on NBC radio and established the composer immediately. Since then, it’s been featured in so many films it’s hard to imagine the world without it. In his personal life, Barber was happily ensconced with the dashing Italian composer Gian Carlo Menotti, whom he met as a fellow student at Curtis.
What a power couple! Menotti’s first opera was performed at La Scala, and he went on to introduce millions of Americans to opera on TV (Amahl and the Night Visitors) and Broadway (The Saint of Bleecker Street). Critics may have been ambivalent about the populist Menotti, but not about his more cultured partner. Barber came later to opera – and enjoyed success in more august venues -- with Vanessa, premiered in 1958 at the Metropolitan Opera with a Menotti libretto. Their Mt. Kisco, N.Y., home was the scene of fabulous, even legendary social gatherings (though Tallulah Bankhead so intimidated Barber that he locked himself in his bathroom).
Artistically, Barber triumphed in one genre after another. He won the Pulitzer Prize for both Vanessa and his 1962 Piano Concerto. His Piano Sonata was premiered by Vladimir Horowitz. And then? The normally witty, congenial Barber became unaccountably difficult. A mere autograph request could inspire a tactless rant. Though Menotti moved on – still a close friend, still eager to collaborate – Barber cloistered himself to create perhaps the most visible commission in the history of American opera: a work for the grand opening of the Metropolitan Opera house in Lincoln Center. The subject was monumental – an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra – with a fail-safe creative team including director Franco Zeffirelli and soprano Leontyne Price. The opening, however, was the most notorious premiere since The Rite of Spring.
Despite opening night snafus – Price, for example, became trapped in the pyramid from which she was meant to emerge -- the audience cheered. Within days, though, that appreciation changed. European critics in town to cover the grand opening damned the opera with condescension and faint praise. Barber didn’t know of the reception until after his departure by boat for Italy.
*
Even among his contemporaries - such as Aaron Copland, who created musical Americana with the use of folk songs, and Leonard Bernstein, who integrated jazz elements into symphonies and Broadway musicals - Barber was seen as the Europe-influenced holdover, long after Europe abandoned what Barber drew from it. He looked backward with yearning and nostalgia. His Violin Concerto begins with a slow, meditative song for violin and orchestra, yet with none of the usual competition between the two entities. The second movement is even more introspective, like a confession, and the final movement shows off the violin in typical European concerto style. Barber's Knoxville Summer of 1915 sets to music James Agee's prose description of a Victorian-era summer evening, seen through the loving eyes of a child. And, of course, Adagio for Strings, with its magically ascending three-note motif, rises to heaven – but never gains entrance.
When Americans followed and eventually one-upped Europeans in the realm of musical experimentation, throughout the 1950s Barber was composing on borrowed time. He was a dinosaur – albeit a beloved one - but remained a moving target, jumping from genre to genre so that few were able to follow his creative evolution toward Antony and Cleopatra. The martial brass writing in the 1954 choral work Prayers of Kierkegaard morphed into the militaristic fanfares of Egypt and Rome, while the lean, often percussive, mythology-based Andromeda's Farewell prepared him to portray Shakespeare's characters as something more than operatic warblers. The lyricism of Vanessa was loosened up, even unraveled, to accommodate more the complicated figures in Antony and Cleopatra. No doubt the Met crowd was expecting Vanessa. The symphonic crowd, which might have known Andromeda's Farewell, would have shunned the opera once it was designated a flop. And the choral crowd probably couldn’t afford tickets to either symphony or opera. Anyone expecting a movie-goddess Cleopatra would have been taken aback by Barber’s demanding, imperious version -- more Margaret Thatcher than Elizabeth Taylor. The great love story between Cleopatra and Marc Antony was as political as it was romantic. No wonder Barber wrote for the gutteral lower reaches of Leontyne Price's register and made Marc Antony a bass rather than a more lyrical baritone. More heretically still, he skipped the standard operatic love duet.Heard in a live recording of its opening night performance, Antony and Cleopatra comes off as a tough, tight masterpiece. But with the overblown and distracting Zeffirelli production, could anyone hear the music? Photos of the work resemble a Hollywood biblical epic, a genre then in disfavor. At 56, Barber experienced his first failure. Judging his work harshly, he suppressed almost half his output, including his Symphony No. 2. And like Caesar, he had assassins close by: Zeffirelli later admitted he overproduced the opera because he didn't entirely believe in it. The Met's artistic director Rudolf Bing was similarly unconvinced, and canceled the planned revival. The composer just stayed in Italy – for five years.
By the time Barber returned to Antony and Cleopatra in 1974 for a thorough reshaping, under Menotti’s guidance, he was struggling with alcoholism. He gamely described the revision as “less Rome, more Egypt” and added a superb love duet. It was re-premiered at the Juilliard School, recorded at Menotti’s Festival of Two Worlds, and televised by Lyric Opera of Chicago in the 1990s. Nobody disliked it. But the opera always seems a tad remote and curiously subdued. Then you return to the live Metropolitan Opera recording of the world premiere, conducted by the magnetic Thomas Schippers, and realize “Ah, that’s it!” Barber got it right the first time.
During this period Barber composed a choral/orchestral setting of Pablo Neruda poems titled The Lovers, premiered in Philadelphia in 1971 and reprised the following season. But it appears to have made little lasting impression. Yet hearing the piece today – it’s harmonically intoxicating, and unique among the composer’s works - one wonders if Barber could’ve written The Messiah and not have it be noticed. Copland, Bernstein and Menotti were also falling from grace, though not as badly as Barber. Copland stopped composing after 1967. Menotti wrote music into the 1980s though his hits all hailed from the 1950s. Bernstein tried Broadway one last time in 1976 with the unsuccessful 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, wrote plenty of excellent music after that but generally had to conduct it himself for it to be performed. He died in 1990, dreaming of a Holocaust opera he never even began. Barber didn’t have a conducting career to keep his works before the public. He ended up rewriting Adagio for Strings as a choral work, which must’ve seemed like a desperate bid for attention.
By the 1980s, the avant garde movement wore out its limited public. Influences from Bernstein and Copland began echoing through the works of young composers such as Aaron Jay Kernis, Richard Danielpour and Jennifer Higdon. Now, the solidity and unshakable purpose of Barber may make him the most influential of them all. Higdon’s Violin Concerto, which won the Pulitzer Prize this year, would never have been written with such melodic and harmonic appeal without the precedent of Barber’s work in the same medium. In opera, Barber has inspired composers such as Jake Heggie and Mark Adamo. Had Barber’s final years unfolded in a more receptive era, might he have been shipped off to the Betty Ford Center and then come back to write more masterpieces? It’s possible. But the reality of his final years is sad. A year before he died, Barber formally retired from composing. I had occasion to ask him why. His reply: “I want to take up something interesting, like deep sea diving.” The nonchalance was astonishing. But the suggestion that he had come to place so little value on his creative gifts was tragic. David Patrick Stearns is classical music critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer.
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