Samuel Barber was born March 9th, 1910 in West Chester, Pennsylvania, in the suburbs of Philadelphia. He grew up in a middle-class family with his father, a doctor and respected member of the Episcopalian community, his mother, an amateur piano player of Irish descent, and his sister Sara, three years younger. Samuel Barber Dover Beach Op3 (1931) Dover Beach was written when Barber was a twenty one year old student at the Curtis Institute and represents the first of his extended pieces for voice and ensemble. Barber, a singer with a fine baritone voice, was in some demand as a recitalist, a singularly unusual role for a composer and he made.
Despite the great compositional technique Barber learned in his youth from dedicated study at the Curtis Institute of Music, his muse was a sensitive one, keenly affected by the circumstances of his life. The last fifteen years of Barber¹s life were not happy ones: his grand opera Anthony and Cleopatra had failed at the Metropolitan Opera in 1966; he and his longtime companion Gian Carlo Menotti decided to sell their Westchester, New York home 'Capricorn,' where they had lived for thirty years, with disastrous results for Barber; he became increasingly dependent on alcohol; and he was diagnosed in 1978 with the lymphatic cancer that would eventually kill him. The three songs of Op. 45 are wonderful things, but they need to be heard with this background in mind. Barber's chosen texts reflect not only his increasing mood of melancholia but, more importantly, his lifelong love affair with the English language. Only in the Mélodies passagères (1950-51) did he actually set poems in a foreign tongue, but the texts for the Op. 45 reflect his deep absorption in European culture as a whole. Each is an exceptionally fluent English translation of a Continental poem: James Joyce's 'Now Have I Fed and Eaten Up the Rose' is based on the 19th century German of Gottfried Keller; Czeslaw Milosz transforms the surreal Polish verse of Jerzy Harasymowicz into 'A Green Lowland of Pianos'; and Christopher Middleton's 'O Boundless, Boundless Evening' is an elegant rendering of a German poem by Georg Heym. The songs were composed on commission from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and were premiered on April 29, 1974 by baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and pianist Charles Wadsworth. Keller's original poem is part of a cycle which concerns the disturbing prospect of a man buried alive; there is no terror in Barber's setting of this Joycean extract, but the accompaniment features an obsessive use of a single falling figure that suggests a protagonist with nowhere to go. The song is slow and doleful in an A minor key only occasionally inflected with chromatic harmony; it rises to a weary climax, then falls away. The next two songs also rely on repetitive piano figures independent of the vocal lines, which are always delivered with a liquid resignation, mostly staying in the middle range: these are evidence not only of Barber's sureness of touch in matching tones to words, but perhaps also of a sense of creative exhaustion. But 'Green Lowland' is a gentle song full of funny surprises, and for the last one Barber writes one of his grandest and most nostalgic tunes to match 'the glow/Of long hills on the skyline,' soon to fade. These are landscape paintings as much as songs, made from an amalgam of straightforward, Anglo-Italian melody and harmonies which tastefully evoke Scriabin and Liszt while maintaining a strong personality of their own.
Parts/Movements
- Now have I fed and eaten up the rose
- A Green Lowland of Pianos
- O boundless, boundless evening
Appears On
Year | Title / Performer | Label / Catalog # | AllMusic Rating |
---|---|---|---|
2018 | AVI 8553402 | ||
2017 | Randall Scarlata / Laurie Ward | TROY 1679 | |
2011 | Aureole | ||
2010 | Joshua Hopkins / Jerad Mosbey | 2615 | |
2009 | Thomas Allen / Endellion String Quartet / Roger Vignoles | 5099969523 | |
2003 | Deutsche Grammophon | ||
2002 | Deutsche Grammophon | ||
2001 | 7511 | ||
1995 | Thomas Allen / Endellion String Quartet / Roger Vignoles | 45033 | |
1994 | Deutsche Grammophon | ||
1991 | 35 |
Written at the tender age of eighteen, Samuel Barber's Serenade for String Quartet (or String Orchestra) is the work of a talented student on the brink of individual mastery. I say 'brink' deliberately, since in some ways the work is extremely conservative, not least in its well-worn title (at the urging of his uncle Sidney Homer, Barber would sharpen and modernize his titles very soon), its firm roots in late-Romantic European composition, and its strict classical forms. And yet there is something mysterious, even tragic in this little work, a unique expressive seed out of which Barber's later, more developed music would come: perhaps that is what caused Uncle Sidney to question the use of the blithe moniker 'Serenade.' (The orchestral works Music for a Scene from Shelley and the first Essay for Orchestra are the earliest examples.) G. Schirmer, Barber's sole publisher, originally published it in 1942; they brought the work out again in 1944, at which time the composer included some minimal notations that would permit a string orchestra performance with double bass. The Serenade has never been one of Barber's most popular pieces, but this arrangement has proved far more popular than the original quartet version, performances of which are exceedingly rare. Pure chamber music was never Barber's strong point.
This brief work is cast in three movements: an Allegro con spirito with a introduction, Un poco adagio; an Andante con moto; and an Allegro giocoso finale, subtitled 'Dance.' (Barber later used it as incidental music for a student play.) The introduction is worth lingering over. It uses an entirely ordinary turn-of-the-century harmonic language, but the melancholy lyricism, already evident in the cello line, the asymmetrical phrasing and the rapidity of the harmonic rhythm give its passages a moody and unstable feeling. Hugo Wolf has often been suggested as a model in the Serenade as a whole, but if so, this music is more suggestive of his gloomy Spanish Songbook than of the jaunty Italian Serenade. It is ultimately a weird kind of species counterpoint exercise, half in love with easeful death.
The allegro proper is a direct outgrowth of the introduction, both in its A minor tonality and in its thematic material. A taut and trim sonata form--with its second theme in the relative major, no less--it surprises the listener with its quick transitions, spunky cross-rhythms, and foreshortened structure: the recapitulation drops the second theme, instead expanding the first theme material into a passionate climax in broadened triple meter.
The andante, a sad little siciliano in rondo form, deepens the sense of tragedy inherent in the Serenade's opening: the B sections, with very Brahmsian two-against-three rhythms (Alto Rhapsody department), feature a searching melody set in canon for the cello and first violin, and the movement is wrapped up with a diminutive coda. The finale, in sprightly triple time, is the only jovial part of the work--here the Italian Serenade comparison rings true--though it continues the composer's predilection for quick modulations and fleet-footed rhythmic gamesmanship. The central, more lyrical section recalls the music of the opening movement.
Parts/Movements
- Un poco adagio - Allegro con spirito
- Andante con moto
- Dance. Allegro giocoso
Appears On
Year | Title / Performer | Label / Catalog # | AllMusic Rating |
---|---|---|---|
2013 | Sono Luminus | ||
2012 | dogma chamber orchestra / Mikhail Gurewitsch | ||
2011 | dogma chamber orchestra / Mikhail Gurewitsch | AUD 9121717 | |
2010 | Marin Alsop / Royal Scottish National Orchestra | 8506021 | |
2009 | Thomas Allen / Endellion String Quartet / Roger Vignoles | 5099969523 | |
2005 | 1649 | ||
2004 | 5234 | ||
2002 | Naxos | ||
2001 | Janos Balint / Budapest Strings / Reinhold Friedrich / Lajos Lencses | 10505 | |
2001 | Nicolas Flagello / Orchestra da Camera di Roma | 88107 | |
1999 | Vanguard | ||
1995 | Various Artists | 37206-2 | |
1995 | Thomas Allen / Endellion String Quartet / Roger Vignoles | 45033 | |
1993 | Vanguard | ||
79002 | |||
Laserlight | |||
12472 | |||
Amplitude Records |