Program Notes: Samuel Barber
On Saturday, December 3 at 8pm, rising star Alexi Kenney, recipient of a prestigious 2016 Avery Fisher Career Grant, joins the University Symphony Orchestra for Samuel Barber’s magnificent "Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 14". Barber’s "First Essay for Orchestra" and slightly earlier "Symphony No. 1 in One Movement" – an overtly dramatic work that incorporates the lyricism, intensity, and expressiveness typical of the composer’s idiom – balance the program. Reception to follow. Donations requested at the door: $10 general, $5 students
RSVP here: https://www.facebook.com/events/1728053574182289/x
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Program Notes “Skyscrapers, subways, and train lights play no part in the music I write.” Thus pronounced the young American composer Samuel Barber in a 1935 newspaper interview. With this polemical claim, Barber (then 25 years old) wanted to make clear to his audience that he intended to be a composer of the people, and that the music he wrote was a continuation of the traditional Western tonal language with which they were familiar. The biographer Barbara Heyward suggests that with this statement, Barber was making a sly reference to the modernist ballet Skyscrapers (1924) by John Alden Carpenter, but he could also have been thinking of the Italian futurists who crafted music that echoed the noise of the city, or the Swiss composer Arthur Honegger who wrote the influential orchestral piece Pacific 231 (1923), mimicking the sound of a steam locomotive. But Honegger’s music wasn’t widely embraced by the American public – nor was the music of the futurists, for that matter. In that 1935 interview, Barber continued: “My aim is to write good music that will be comprehensible to as many people as possible, instead of music heard only by small, snobbish musical societies in the large cities.”
Barber stuck to that goal all his life – and indeed, he achieved it. Thirty-five years after his death, his music remains a perennial audience favorite, securing his reputation as a composer who wrote music for all Americans. Barber’s music is widely programmed in the United State during the regular concert season, but it also is summoned to provide comfort during moments of national crisis. Barber’s mournful, elegiac Adagio for Strings – probably his most well-known piece – was broadcast live during the announcement of John F. Kennedy’s death in 1963, and was also performed during memorial services for the September 11th attacks of 2001. How did this composer’s music become such a cultural fixture in postwar America? What is it about its sound that people find so compelling and relatable? We might glean some clues by exploring the history and character of the music on our program tonight.
First, we have the laconic Essay for Orchestra (later retitled First Essay for Orchestra, after the composer decided to revisit the form in 1942 and 1978). The Essay was premiered in 1937, with its composer fresh out of school and on the brink of international recognition. Barber, a native Pennsylvanian, had graduated from the now-famous Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, which had only recently been established. The young musical prodigy had just won two awards (a Pulitzer fellowship and the Prix de Rome) that allowed him to study composition in Italy for two years. Shortly afterwards, legendary conductor Arturo Toscanini gave Barber the premiere that would make his career. Toscanini, who had become the conductor of the NBC Symphony Orchestra that very year (for an orchestra that was created expressly for him), conducted a program that included Barber’s Essay and Adagio for Strings. This performance was an enormous success, and established a strong working relationship between the composer and conductor. Toscanini is said to have marveled at the simplicity and beauty of Barber’s Adagio.
The Essay, too, has the kind of Steinbeckian simplicity and elegance that undoubtedly contributed to the success of that performance. Barber invented the “essay” form himself. Like its literary corollary, the compact Essay explores a single theme from multiple angles, in attempt to reach a resolution. The piece begins with a slow, melancholy, questioning theme played by the string section. This melody’s main rhythmic motive is a distinctive long-short-short-long idea that repeats with each subsequent phrase, sounding almost like a repeated word, or a painful question searching for an answer. This initial quiet theme gradually swells with emotion, spilling over into an agitated forte before dropping off into an eerie canon in the brass section. Barber cast the Essay in a two-part contrasting structure with the hope of making the literary essay analogy more tangible – but the second contrasting section is actually a clever elaboration of the first; it uses the same basic cellular theme but speeds up its rhythms, taking on the attitude of a sprawling, insistent scherzo whose short-short-long rhythms saturate the parts of every instrument of the orchestra. The tone in this work is decidedly more dissonant and daring that of the Adagio for Strings. The second section of the Essay combines the two themes, with a quick Scherzo swirling above like the eddies of a swift river and the mournful Adagio coursing underneath, like a powerful emotional undercurrent. The concise Essay for Orchestra ends with the return of the eerie trumpet-calls, which signals that the piece has reached an abrupt close – a hushed conclusion that feels both resigned and icy.
Even if the Essay was a formal invention by Barber himself, Barber’s symphonic forms have their foundation in the “New German School” of the mid-nineteenth century, a group of composers that include Wagner and Liszt. Within his Symphony in One Movement, Barber introduces short and memorable motives, transforms those motives over the course of a segment, and ultimately comes back to them with a new background and a fresh context. The sort of motivic development in Barber’s Symphony is much like Wagner’s use of Leitmotifs. Of course, this is not to say that any use of motivic development would place a composer in company with the New German School: what counts here is the way those motives are transformed within the structure of the piece. Liszt’s famed Piano Sonata in B minor, for instance, is an example of “cyclical form”: the single-movement sonata uses two main motives that morph and evolve over the course of the piece, to emerge at the end with a sense of clarity and depth. Barber’s Symphony in One Movement likewise compresses the four movements of the classical form into a sweeping, unified panorama. The first section of the symphony introduces three themes that are then woven together throughout the remainder of the piece. When these themes recur, sometimes the repetition is highlighted: for example, when the Andante tranquillo third section of the symphony begins, the lyrical oboe that soars over a bed of muted strings immediately calls to mind the way the theme was first introduced at the beginning of the piece. At other points, however, Barber disguises his themes. Earlier in the Essay, the Scherzo section utilized a primary motive that was basically a quick, rhythmic version of the main theme – and in the exact same way, this symphony’s Scherzo takes material from the first section and speeds it up to a scampering pulse. And again, like the Essay, the Symphony in One Movement ends with all its themes combined in a dramatic crescendo of emotion.
Barber used a cyclical approach to his motives: that is, the motives grow and change over the course of the piece, and at the end they return transformed, as though they had reached their full potential. If the Barber Symphony were a novel it would be a nineteenth-century Bildungsroman, tracing the emotional development of an intrepid main character. In this way Barber’s tonal language (or, perhaps, rhetoric) was rooted in the practice of nineteenth-century Germanic music. This “rootedness” even landed the composer a performance of the Symphony in One Movement by the Vienna Philharmonic at the 1937 Salzburg festival. Before that year, the conservative festival had never featured a symphonic work by an American composer. Barber’s Symphony received glowing reviews from the Austrian press, who were quick to point out that his “firm handling of the theme, the strict adherence to form, his constancy to the basic principles of tone can all be traced to Vienna.”
Finally, the Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 14, is Barber’s most popular and enduring work after the Adagio for Strings. In the other two works on this program, we hear a constant tension between unfettered lyricism and an eccentric Scherzo crackling with energy; the Violin Concerto likewise exemplifies this uneasy balance. It was originally commissioned for Iso Briselli, a violin prodigy who attended the Curtis Institute with Barber. The composer wrote the first two movements of the concerto in 1939, during a summer in Switzerland. The violinist, however, did not think the opening movements were flashy enough and asked for more virtuosic writing. Barber continued his work on the concerto, hoping to write a Finale that would fit the bill, but his stay in Europe was interrupted. All Americans were given the warning to leave Europe because of the anticipated Nazi invasion of Poland. Barber’s initial cable to his parents in August was: “Both sailing Brittanic September first . . . not worried.” But that ship cancelled its journey at the last hour. By this time, foreigners were desperate to leave Europe. Luckily, Barber was able to work his connections and find ship reservations for the following morning. That night, Barber wrote in his notebook: “Increasing war anxiety . . . Americans warned to leave Paris. Black nights, Pantheon by moonlight.”
The masterful concerto that Barber eventually finished manages to balance a glowing, burnished lyricism against an ever-present threat of dissonance and darkness. In the first movement, the violin enters with a rhapsodic stream of melody over a mellow G Major harmony in the orchestra. Its second theme sounds like a quick, lilting Scottish folksong with snappy dotted rhythms, balancing out the lyrical first theme. The first hint of darkness does not surface until late in the exposition of this movement, and then there it is short-lived, fading back into the folksong. A parallel moment occurs toward the end of the Allegro when the heart-pounding dissonance threatens to take over, but the soloist’s cadenza delivers us safely back to a shimmering conclusion in the major key.
The second movement begins with an extended oboe solo that reminds us of Barber’s commitment to vocal melody: as a student at Curtis, he was careful to cultivate his own voice with weekly singing lessons, with the express purpose of nurturing his understanding of cantabile line. In this movement, the violin soloist does not enter for almost a full three minutes – and when the soloist does enter, it is quietly, tentatively, over a hushed cushion of sound. The violin’s “voice” gradually becomes more restless, alternating between the initial cantabile and an uneasy, shifty agitato.
For the last movement of the Violin Concerto, Barber takes a completely different turn: the Finale, more thoroughgoing in its dissonance than the first two movements, is a blisteringly fast Moto perpetuo with punchy, irregular accents. This eccentric Finale, in fact, almost derailed Barber’s commission. The violinist Briselli (who was to premiere the work) was disappointed with the final movement, claiming it was not appropriate to the tone set by the first two movements. His stated reason was that it was “too lightweight,” but we might speculate that the Finale’s more dissonant, modern tinge turned off Briselli – or perhaps it was the technical difficulty of the solo line. In any case, Briselli requested that Barber alter and expand the middle section of the Finale, but Barber refused. Incensed, the composer decided to exhibit the Finale to a group of influential Curtis compatriots and prove its worth. He recruited a talented student, Herbert Baumel, to practice and play the movement with only two hours’ notice. Baumel’s impromptu performance took place before a small audience in the piano studio of Josef Hofmann. Fortunately the student gave a dazzling and wholly satisfying show. After a round of applause, all those present at the performance promised to ask the original violinist Briselli to relinquish his privilege of premiering the work, to allow a different violinist to play the concerto as it stood.
Over the course of these three works, e can discern three facets of Barber’s musical personality: his canny synthesis of other compositional styles, his penchant for the development and combination of themes in a literary fashion, and, finally, the uneasy electric energy of the sonic landscapes he created – a brightness that nevertheless teeters on the edge of pensive nostalgia at every moment. In a radio interview towards the end of Barber’s life, the composer admitted: “I myself wrote always as I wished, and without a tremendous desire to find the latest thing possible. . . . I wrote as I wanted to [write,] for myself.” These words seem to reinforce the pillars of Barber’s style exhibited by tonight’s program: they make plain his insulation from more avant-garde twentieth-century modernism and his populist self-image, for sure, but they also confirm his fundamental ambivalence, his melancholy, and his unique and intensely personal compositional voice. –– Notes by Andrew Malilay White