America's Golden Boy

I know the name, but not the music.


* MUSIC
* MAY 18, 2010

America's Golden Boy

By BARRYMORE LAURENCE SCHERER

Philadelphia

In this centennial year of the American composer Samuel Barber (1910-81), performances of his work are taking place throughout the nation and abroad.

Meanwhile, as I communed recently with his spirit at Philadelphia's Curtis Institute of Music, Barber's alma mater, a birthday bash was in full swing. Central to the festivities was a celebratory all-Barber concert by students and faculty in the handsome recital hall where the composer himself had performed as a student.

A child prodigy who had entered the newly founded conservatory at age 14, Barber was very much its golden boy when he graduated in 1934. Handsome, refined and well-spoken, he was a musical triple threat as well, achieving distinction there as a composer, pianist and singer.

Barber recorded his own setting of Matthew Arnold's poem "Dover Beach" with the Curtis String Quartet in 1935. The recording preserves not only the lovely tone of his light, nuanced baritone, but his superb diction. The voice and its music were central to Barber's creativity; even his instrumental works are guided by a born singer's lyrical sensibility. While unmistakably 20th-century in character, his melodies tend to move in singable arcs rather than the jagged declamation of much modernist writing.

Barber, who wrote an operetta at age 10 (to a libretto by the family's Irish cook), had revealed himself as worthy of professional rank while still at Curtis, and it wasn't long before his first major orchestral score, the sparkling overture to Sheridan's comedy "The School for Scandal" (1931), entered the symphonic repertoire. In 1937 his Symphony in One Movement (1936) became the first American symphonic work performed at the Salzburg Festival. In 1938 Arturo Toscanini conducted his "First Essay for Orchestra" and the "Adagio for Strings" on an NBC Symphony broadcast, and by the time his Violin Concerto appeared the next year, Barber's international position was secure.

Barber has been called many things—neo-romantic, eclectic, conservative—terms considered almost pejorative during the second half of the 20th century. During Barber's formative years, radical American composers such as Leo Ornstein, Henry Cowell and Charles Ives, happily experimented with new musical language, much of it bitingly dissonant. They exhorted young Americans to embrace the avant-garde. But Barber's musical development had been carefully guided from childhood by his aunt and uncle, Louise and Sidney Homer. She was a star contralto of the Metropolitan Opera during Caruso's heyday; her husband was a highly regarded composer of art songs. Uncle Sidney encouraged Barber to pursue his own artistic path regardless of outside pressures. At Curtis, Prof. Rosario Scalero, a prominent composer in his own right, further instilled in Barber a deep sense of traditional craftsmanship.

Hence, Barber held himself aloof from the controversies that honed the cutting edge of his time. Though he increasingly incorporated Stravinskian dissonance and complex syncopation into such works as the Violin Concerto, "Medea's Meditation and Dance of Vengeance," the "Capricorn Concerto" and Cello Concerto, he felt under no obligation to employ anything that interfered with his fundamental urge to write emotionally expressive, well-crafted music.

Composer David Ludwig, artistic chair of the Curtis performance studies department, observes that creating a good composition is like making a good story. "And like well-written stories, Barber's scores are structurally watertight."

Barber might today be indisputably regarded as the standard-bearer of 20th-century American music were it not for two contemporaries—Aaron Copland, 10 years older than Barber, and Leonard Bernstein, eight years younger. Both outlived him. Copland and Bernstein deployed the postwar media to greater advantage than Barber, conducting, teaching, writing books and making the most of a golden age of network-televised concert music that put them in the public eye much more frequently than Barber. Moreover, each produced a body of work that struck a chord among a wide range of audiences: Copland's homespun ballet scores captured in the popular mind the essence of rural America, while Bernstein's jazz- and Broadway-inflected music embodied urban America's cosmopolitanism and cultural malaise. Their works' immense popularity led to widespread performance and recognition. Because Barber never sought his own easily recognized all-American idiom, his music—however rich in invention and sheer beauty—did not achieve the same popular identity.

Nonetheless, having already received a Pulitzer Prize for his 1958 opera "Vanessa" (premiered at the Metropolitan Opera, and the first American opera to be staged by the Salzburg Festival), Barber seemed poised to consolidate his pre-eminence through the three commissions he received to inaugurate New York's Lincoln Center. His 1962 Piano Concerto, written for the opening week of Philharmonic (now Avery Fisher) Hall, garnered him a second Pulitzer Prize. "Andromache's Farewell," a concert scene for soprano and orchestra based on Euripides' "Trojan Women," was lauded as well. But the highest honor was supposed to be realized with the premiere of his opera "Antony and Cleopatra" to open the new Metropolitan Opera House in 1966. It was a fiasco primarily because of Franco Zeffirelli's overwrought production, and because preperformance hubris had set expectations unrealistically high. Nevertheless, it seemed as though the musical press were gunning for Barber at the time. Revised, and restaged by Barber's life-partner and sometime collaborator, Gian-Carlo Menotti, it was received far more positively at its second premiere at the Juilliard School in 1975. But on a personal level, Barber seems never to have regained the wind in his sails, and died believing himself forgotten.

On the contrary, Barber has remained among the most programmed American composers over the decades. His music represents the best meaning of "conservatism"—the conservation and perpetuation of what Barber felt was a living musical tradition stretching back two centuries. And Barber's work represents his lifelong pursuit of honest, meaningful expression. "There's no reason music should be difficult for an audience to understand," he said in an interview later in life.

Probably the most frequently performed Barber work has been the Adagio for Strings. Yet it has never become hackneyed. "Because it's perfect music," says Mr. Ludwig, "and ravishingly beautiful. I think there is something melancholic about it that appeals to everyone, almost a sense of loss that moves people deeply." He also says that while Barber's training is "Eurocentric, his music is not just American in style but very democratic. It's not just accessible to the most highly trained musicians but also to anyone out there in Rittenhouse Square. So its accessibility runs across the board. It's vibrant, it's full of energy, it's completely unpretentious."

Mr. Scherer writes about music and the fine arts for the Journal.