The piece might never have seen the light of day had it not been for the intervention of another fellow student, who performed the piece after just a few hours of preparation, thereby proving it playable. When Briselli complained that they were too simple, Barber retaliated with a ferociously difficult finale, which was rejected on the grounds that it didn’t suit the rest of the piece.įels demanded his money back, and Barber told him to take a hike. Barber took an advance and went off to Switzerland to write the first two movements of what would be his 1939 violin concerto.
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While Barber was still a student at the Curtis Institute, soap tycoon Samuel Fels offered him a commission to write a piece for his adopted son, a violinist and fellow student called Iso Briselli. He was also a man who could, without hesitation, bite the hand that was supposed to be feeding him. During his lifetime this earned him some plaudits, including two Pulitzer prizes (one for his piano sonata and one for his opera, Vanessa), but his distrust of the avant-garde, combined with his waspish tongue and fondness for bitchy one-liners, may have conspired to keep him in the musical outback. Instead he followed his own, resolutely melodic musical path. If his work has generally fallen out of favour, it probably has more to do with his steadfast refusal to experiment with serialism or atonality.
Has Barber’s music been neglected because he was gay? It’s unlikely. Their partnership, both musical and emotional, lasted for many years before it finally broke up in the late 1960s. Within four years a new student had arrived at the institute, a young Italian by the name of Gian-Carlo Menotti. The “worrying secret” may, however, have been more poignant than just an ambition to become a composer. By the time he was 14 Samuel was enrolled at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. What mother could resist? Not Mrs Barber. At the age of nine he penned a missive to his mother (see right) to confide his “worrying secret”, that he meant to be a composer rather than an athlete. Young Samuel must have been a precocious child. He grew up in a comfortable, cultured milieu: his aunt was a leading contralto at the Metropolitan Opera in New York and his uncle was a successful composer of American art songs. His father was a doctor, his mother a talented pianist. He was born Samuel Osborne Barber II in West Chester, Pennsylvania. The celebration is being marked with particular thoroughness in Ireland, perhaps because Barber – who had Irish blood on his mother’s side – was proud of his Irish roots and made use of poems by Joyce, Yeats and James Stephens alongside those of WH Auden, Robert Graves and Rilke among his many song settings for piano and voice. With any luck this should become apparent over the coming 12 months as the music world celebrates the centenary of the composer’s birth. There is, however, a great deal more to Barber than those mournful descending motifs. It has turned up at weepy moments in films, among them Oliver Stone’s Platoonand David Lynch’s The Elephant Man.Įven when revamped as an Ibiza-style dance track by electro-meister William Orbit, or as an unaccompanied vocal by the Celtic Tenors, it manages to keep its melancholy intact. It was played at Einstein’s funeral, for example, and at the last night of the Proms in 2001 to commemorate the victims of the September 11th attacks. With its ability to wipe smiles from faces instantly and replace them with lugubrious expressions (and even the occasional tear), it also seems to have become a form of musical shorthand, a signal of right-thinking cultural distress. This 10-minute slice of musical misery seems to have turned itself into Barber’s Greatest Hit – if not Barber’s Only Hit. SAY “Samuel Barber” to the average, reasonably well-informed music lover, and the chances are they’ll reply, “Adagio for Strings”. There’s more to Samuel Barber than a mournful Adagio for Strings, and his centenary should help restore an unfairly languishing reputation, writes ARMINTA WALLACE