Samuel Barber

Born March 9, 1910, Westchester, Pennsylvania.
Died January 23, 1981, New York City.

Adagio for Strings

Samuel Barber grew up in a house filled with music. Practicing piano was as important as playing ball, song recitals were a favorite evening entertainment, and the names of composers and performers were dropped during dinner table conversation. Barber's parents were not surprised when their son began playing the piano when he was six years old and composing music at seven, and they did not argue when, at the age of nine, he told them he intended to be a composer ("Don't ask me to try and forget this unpleasant thing and go and play football," he warned them.) Sam's aunt Louise was internationally known as Louise Homer, the great American contralto, and her husband Sydney was a highly regarded composer of songs. Shortly after Barber left the safety and comfort of his family home, he found success and encouragement in the greater music world. He was only twenty-three when the Philadelphia Orchestra gave the world premiere of his first orchestral score, the Overture to The School for Scandal, and soon his compositions were performed by many of the most celebrated figures of the day.

Nothing in Barber's life proved more fateful than his contact with the Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini. Barber first met Toscanini in 1933, when he visited him at his summer home on the shores of Lake Maggiore. Although Toscanini rarely showed serious interest in American music, he was quite taken with Barber's work, and later said he would consider playing a short piece of his on tour with the NBC Symphony Orchestra. At Toscanini's suggestion, Barber decided to transform the slow music from a recent string quartet into this eloquent Adagio for strings. Toscanini conducted the NBC Symphony in the premiere during a coast-to-coast broadcast in November 1938, and almost overnight the Adagio became as well-known as any piece of American music.

Over the decades, Barber's Adagio has reached far beyond the concert hall. It has been played at countless funerals (including those of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Prince Rainer of Monaco), it was inevitable background music for various 9/11 memorials, and it has become part of popular culture from its abundant use in television and film. (Director David Lynch insisted on using it for the ending of his 1980 film The Elephant Man, over the objections of the film's composer, and more famously still, Oliver Stone picked it to accompany chilling scenes of battlefield carnage in his 1986 Vietnam war epic Platoon.)

Like Mahler's famous Adagietto from his Fifth Symphony, which Lucchino Visconti popularized in the soundtrack for his 1971 film Death in Venice, Barber's Adagio has taken on a life of its own—one far removed from the composer's original intent. Marked "Molto adagio espressivo cantando" (very slowly, with songlike expressiveness), Barber's Adagio is a single, long melody that moves slowly (usually in stepwise motion), unfolding and building, as it weaves its way through the string orchestra. It reaches a peak and then dissolves. Although this music is now indelibly identified with tragedy and mourning, it was in fact inspired by Barber's reading of a passionate poem by Virgil from the Georgics. In Robert Pinsky's translation, the poem begins

As when far off in the middle of the ocean
A breast-shaped curve of wave begins to whiten
And rise above the surface, then rolling on
Gathers and gathers until it reaches land
Huge as a mountain and crashes among the rocks
With a prodigious roar, and what was deep
Comes churning up from the bottom in mighty swirls
Of sunken sand and living things and water . . .

Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

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