Barber used literature as inspiration for many instrumental compositions. Among his favorites were the Irish poet, W. Browning noted that Barber was never without a book of poems by his bedside. He reveled in poetry with a musician’s respect for the well-wrought phrase. He was, says friend and pianist John Browning, “absolutely fluent” in German, French, Italian, and Spanish. And, like most musical prodigies, Barber took to languages and literature. Via their lifelong correspondence, he often sought his uncle’s advice.
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Louise’s husband, Sidney Homer, a song composer, would become Barber’s musical mentor. His mother’s sister, Louise Homer, a contralto, sang frequently at the Metropolitan Opera, where Barber, hearing her when he was six, was “entranced” by her singing in Aida. He penned his first piano piece, prophetically entitled Sadness, twenty-three bars in C Minor, at age seven an incomplete operetta, The Rose Tree, came at ten. One source has him “making up tunes on the piano” at the age of two. The boy had a preternatural gift for composition. Like many homes, the Barbers had a piano, and Sam and his younger sister, Sara, received piano and voice lessons. Heyman notes, music in West Chester was thought a “diversion,” a necessary pastime or hobby, a benchmark of civilized society, not a career per se. They loved spoiling their son whose childhood was overseen by cooks and servants and Sunday outings for classical music. His father was a physician, affable and community-minded, his mother, an amateur pianist. Samuel Osborne Barber was born March 9, 1910, in West Chester, Pennsylvania, to a comfortable and well-educated family, whose lineage was British, Irish, and Scottish. And yet some dark emotion rooted in his core shaped Barber’s childhood and adolescence-lodged in him from birth and emerging as he grows-which might account for his composing a piece of such immense sorrow so early in his life. How did Barber, at the tender age of twenty-six, write such a piece? Is it possible that his youth explains his genius? His genius explain his youth? It seems too easy to say that the child is father to the man when we see how much mature music the man wrote in his twenties.
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I find his character as intriguing as his compositions. And this passion is rooted in Barber the man, a scarily gifted musician, whose youth vibrated with musical ardor and whose age darkened with alcoholic depression. I am fascinated by its emotional tension, its usefulness to our culture, its effect upon my family and me, and its evolution through our changing media. My passion for Barber’s extraordinary elegy encompasses more than the piece itself.
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Hardcover, September 2010, paperback, March 2012.Ī YouTube video of my one-hour "Saddest Music" multimedia presentation at Warwick's Bookstore, La Jolla, CA, Tuesday, November 30, 2010. The Saddest Music Ever Written: The Story of Samuel Barber's "Adagio for Strings," Pegasus Books.
Samuel barber dover beach adagio for strings professional#
If you feel that you cannot complete your paper from scratch, professional academic writers at CustomWritings will write an essay for you, according to your requirements.Īdagio for Strings:Leonard Slatkin, BBC orchestra, September 15, 2001, perhaps its longest and most emotional performance ever. The Saddest Music Ever Written: The Story of Samuel Barber's "Adagio for Strings"