Adagio for Strings

Samuel Barber (1910-1981)

 

Samuel Barber was raised in West Chester, Pennsylvania and took a strong interest in music from an early age. By age 9, he wrote to his mother that he was certain he was supposed to be a composer, and at 14 he entered the newly founded Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where he studied piano, voice and composition.  After graduating from Curtis he had a brief successful career as a baritone before focusing on composition. It is not surprising that his experience as a singer would lead him to compose for voice. Two-thirds of Barber's compositions are songs, and he also composed several operas, and choral works.

 

A Rome Prize enabled him to spend the years 1935-1937 living at the American Academy. Barber composed several important works including his Symphony in One Movement, and his String Quartet no. 1. Adagio for Strings originated as the second movement of this string quartet, composed in 1936. It was while he was in Italy that he had the opportunity to meet Arturo Toscanini, who asked Barber to show him some of his compositions. Barber quickly rose to fame when Toscanini and the NBC Symphony Orchestra broadcast a performance of Barber’s Essay no. 1 and Adagio for Strings in 1938, a performance that reached millions of Americans. After that point, nearly all of Barber's works were composed on commission for prominent performers or ensembles.

 

Barber went on to win two Pulitzers, and election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The Adagio for Strings has become one of the most recognizable and beloved compositions, both in concerts and films ("Platoon," "The Elephant Man," "El Norte," "Lorenzo's Oil"). Paul Wittke writes, "the Adagio’s power lies in being a work whose tragic atmosphere is both subjective and universal — it resonates in each of us a personal note of somber thought. We bring to it our own meaning."