GLR July-August 2023

They Made Music Together

T HE AMERICAN classical music composer Samuel Barber (1910 1981) grew up in wealthy subur ban Philadelphia, part of a music-loving family that included his aunt, Metropolitan Opera star contralto Louise Homer, and her husband Sydney, a minor composer. As a result, young Sam was able to meet and move in the world of the major

two created Vanessa (1957), which had a respectable initial run and has subse quently, like the best of Barber’s concert music, been performed regularly here and inEurope. Finding himself increasingly dismissed by the American avant-garde, Barber started to incorporate more dissonance and unusual harmonies into his music. The re

R ICHARD M. B ERRONG

SAMUEL BARBER His Life and Legacy by Howard Pollack U. of Illinois Press. 744 pages, $59.95

sult was that his newer compositions often met with polite but tepid receptions. This trend came to a head with Antony and Cleopatra (1966), an opera that the Metropolitan Opera com missioned for the opening night in their new house in Lincoln Center. While the chaos of the first performance has evidently been exaggerated with retelling, it did not go well. The massive sets—dreamed up by director Franco Zeffirelli with the ap proval of general manager Rudolf Bing, because they felt the opera wouldn’t succeed on its own—caused problems. The large cast was insufficiently rehearsed because Barber didn’t finish the score until two weeks before opening night. Part of the blame for the work’s poor reception rested with Barber’s score. Far less tuneful than Vanessa , it strikes me as an

figures in the East Coast classical music scene at an age when most music students would have just been looking on in awe from afar. A new book by Howard Pollack, Samuel Barber: His Life and Legacy , covers the life and music of one of American classical music’s best-known composers. Barber gained admission to the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, then as now one of the nation’s great music schools. There he studied composition, but also voice and piano, with thoughts of pursuing all three professionally. At Curtis, he also met and fell in love with the Italian-American music stu dent Gian Carlo Menotti, who would himself go on to compose some of the most successful American operas of the 20th cen tury, including the Christmas classic Amahl and the Night Vis

itors (1951). Barber and Menotti lived together and remained lovers for years, func tioning as a couple in a world that evidently didn’t contemplate that they might be any thing more than friends. Barber was able to travel to Europe in the late 1920s and ’30s. There he met conductor Arturo Toscanini and other luminaries, and got to hear some of the avant-garde music of the time. While he was always aware of this kind of music and later incorporated more of it into his compositions, he never strove to be at the cutting edge of Modernism. He first drew significant public attention in 1931 when Alexander Smallens conducted the premiere of his School for Scandal Over ture as part of a concert with the Philadelphia

Samuel Barber and Gian Carlo Menotti.

endless string of fragments suggesting no clear direction. The notes don’t sound as random as in some of the avant-garde pieces of that period, but neither do they involve us, or let the characters convey recognizable emotions that might draw us into the story. It would take composers like John Adams and Philip Glass to show how avant-garde opera could be both mu sically innovative and emotionally appealing. Antony and Cleopatra ’s failure sent Barber into a depres sion. His relationship with Menotti, which by then had become an open one, fell apart altogether. In 1973, they sold Capricorn, the home outside Philadelphia where they had lived for so many years. Barber kept composing, on average one major new piece a year, but none of them entered the standard concert repertory. I don’t have the data, but I suspect Barber’s concert music, with the exception of a few major works like the Adagio for String,

Orchestra, one of the nation’s most prestigious symphonic en sembles. It was followed by several other important premieres, again with major orchestras led by distinguished musicians, in cluding the Adagio for Strings (1938), which Toscanini pre miered with the NBC Symphony Orchestra on one of his nationally broadcast weekly concerts. As a result, after George Gershwin died in 1937, Barber became one of the nation’s most respected and performed living classical composers. He con tinued to occupy that position for the next two decades. When the Metropolitan Opera decided to commission a new opera from an American composer, no one was surprised when they turned to Barber. He asked Menotti for a libretto, and the Richard M. Berrong, a professor of French literature at Kent State, makes documentary films about World War II in France. July–August 2023

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