'Samuel Barber: His Life & Legacy' (book review)

Howard Pollack's comprehensive biography of the composer

Pres. & Mrs. Kennedy welcome Barber & Menotti to the White House

Samuel Barber (1910-1981) is one of the greatest classical American composers of the 20th century. His music is greatly loved for its rich complexity, depth of feeling, and beautiful craftsmanship.

Author Howard Pollack (who has also written biographies of Aaron Copland and George Gershwin) has just released a comprehensive biography (744 pages) rich with information about Samuel Barber's private and professional life, his music, and his place in the canon. In addition, Pollack takes us behind the scenes to witness the arduous and extremely expensive (and still profitable) preparations for his performances during his lifetime. Furthermore, he delves into the complexities of writing an opera and the intricacies of the music theory behind it.

Barber may be best known for his rapturously beautiful "Agnus Dei" (Lamb of God), commonly known as "Adagio for Strings." Composed when he was 26, it's been popularized in the films "Platoon" and "The Elephant Man" and was widely broadcast after 9/11. Barber's soul-stirring music unifies people at such times.

But during his lifetime, Barber's music was considered old-fashioned by some, despite containing modern elements such as harmonic complexity and dissonance, making it truly Neo-Romantic music.

Aware of the criticism, Barber was known to at times count the number of white-haired old ladies who walked out during a performance, considering it evidence of his success as a modern composer. But his genius was recognized by his peers. Leonard Bernstein called his music "absolute beauty," the title of a documentary film about Samuel Barber.

Composer Samuel Barber

A Coming Out of Sorts
At age 8, little Samuel Barber wrote a remarkable note to his mother:

Notice to Mother and nobody else — Dear Mother: I have written this to tell you my worrying secret. Now don't cry when you read it because it is neither yours or my fault. I suppose I will have to tell it now without any nonsense. To begin with, I was not meant to be an athlet [sic]. I was meant to be a composer, and will be I'm sure. I'll ask you one more thing. Don't ask me to try to forget this unpleasant thing and go play football. Please. Some-times [sic] I've been worrying about this so much that it makes me mad (not very).
Love, Sam Barber II

His mother gave him piano lessons and Barber also studied cello and singing. He got an inside look at the world of opera due to his aunt Louise Homer being the star contralto for the Metropolitan Opera. Her husband Sydney Homer, although his star has since waned, was a working composer whose operas were performed by the Met.

Just as importantly, Barber would sit listening for hours as the family's Irish maid sang folk songs she learned as a child, imparting a life-long love of Irish lore and music that he would later incorporate into his compositions. More than a dozen of his often performed piano pieces were written before Barber was 13 years old.

Barber & Menotti
At Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, Barber and Gian Carlo Menotti, an Italian music composition student, met and fell in love. Menotti didn’t know English, but he knew French, as did Barber, so the school paired them up until Menotti could learn English, which he quickly did, going on to become a librettist in perfect American English.

Barber's mother would soon attend Menotti's recitals as well as her son's. Later the entire Barber family would regularly visit their New York City apartment. The composers even hosted a family wedding in their home. The family, it seems, saw them as bachelors sharing an apartment and never questioned anything beyond that.

Although Barber and Menotti had very different personalities, they would remain beloved friends for the rest of their lives, even after a painful breakup. Barber was prone to melancholy and alcoholism, but the strain in their relationship did not appear until Menotti's career began to eclipse Barber's own. Menotti wrote the American opera “Amahl and the Night Visitors” and won two Pulitzer Prizes in Music, a highly unusual feat later accomplished by Barber as well.

The Gift of Music

I was first introduced to the music of Barber by a family friend who enjoyed singing his music while she accompanied herself on the piano in the living room. Her tiny audience could listen to her for hours. This was the music of her youth growing up in Mexico City.

Barber's music is vaguely reminiscent of the beautiful, sensitive, passionate music of Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky, the 19th-century Russian Romantic composer, who was also gay. Tchaikovsky wrote beloved pieces like "The Nutcracker Suite," "The 1812 Overture" and “Swan Lake.”

Musicians love playing both Barber and Tchaikovsky if they can; both men sometimes wrote music so difficult it is beyond the skill level of many professional orchestras and musicians.

While meeting with Soviet composers in the U.S., Barber said, "...artist[s] quickly bridge frontiers. Music brought us together." The positive experience prompted him to finally accept an invitation to Moscow for a Congress of Composers in 1962. He dined with Khrushchev and traveled a great distance to see the country home where Tchaikovsky grew up.

To be sure, the fierce competition between the U.S. and USSR had a very positive impact on the arts, without which no nation can claim to be great. Unbelievably, although the U.S. had far less money than now, TV networks had their own in-house symphony orchestras, and music programs were fully funded in the schools. We were not about to let the Soviets boast superiority in any area.

Unfair Criticism
In 1966, Barber's opera "Antony & Cleopatra" premiered with an all-American cast of 300 people. Starring Leontyne Price and Justino Diaz, it was led by gay artists Alvin Ailey (choreography), Franco Zeffirelli (libretto & the only non-American in the production) , and Thomas Schippers (conductor) and cost $1.8 million (in 2023 dollars) to produce. The production employed magnificent stage effects, such as Cleopatra floating her barge down the entire length of the enormous Met stage.

The audience included many luminaries including First Lady "Lady Bird" Johnson, Robert and Ted Kennedy, Marc Chagall, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara (whose presence drew hundreds of war protesters outside the hall), and heads of state.

The standing ovation lasted nearly 30 minutes, and the Champaign reception afterward lasted until midnight.

Everyone at Lincoln Center that night, including Barber, felt the opera had been a success until the next day when the reviews were published. But at least some critics seemed to be taking subtle and not so subtle digs at the artists for who they were.

Leontyne Price lived like a nun for a whole year in preparation for the role. She read extensively and even took voice lessons again to increase her vocal variety, and risked life and limb to make a grand entrance in a pyramid that descended from the “sky.”

Nonetheless, one critic wrote that Price's soprano voice "went all Southern and flat," adding that he doesn't say so "because she is Negro."

Harold Schonberg's scathing New York Times critique "in truth seemed coded in homophobic language and ideas," biographer Pollack writes. Schonberg complained of "Barber's failure to explore the text's subject, "love between a man and a woman," and wrote that the opera exhibited "queer ideas current these days in certain circles of the Metropolitan Opera," even calling it a "Swinburnian melange of sad, bad, mad, glad" (Swinburne being a poet associated with sexual transgression).

Pollack writes, "Schuyler Chapin, then VP of Lincoln Center, recalled that the review caused something of a scandal, even though he himself thought [it] 'a fag show,' and on becoming General Manager of the Met in 1972, moved to break up what he regarded as the company's homosexual 'mafia.'"

Although the original production was not recorded, parts of it were later recorded. And Julliard subsequently revived the "failed" opera to great fanfare. This is just one of many historical moments in Barber's life brought to enlightening focus in this fascinating biography.

'Samuel Barber: His Life & Legacy' by Howard Pollack, University of Illinois Press, $59.95 hardcover. www.press.uillinois.edu