I wrote this exactly one year ago today. Here it is, once again. Enjoy!
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Samuel Barber, 1910 to 1981. Well, those are the official dates. But Barber poses a question. What happened to him from the fiasco of his opera Antony and Cleopatra in 1967 and his death in 1981?
“His last years were beset with depression and alcoholism,” says WikiPedia.
Right, the last fifteen years of his life—and what should have been the culmination of his creative life.
My impression was that he had created most of his work early, and then burned out. But in fact, it’s not true. Up until the early 60’s, Barber composes steadily, slowly, and richly.
Richly being the operative word in at least two senses. The guy didn’t seem to need money. Yeah, he taught for a couple of years at Curtis, where he had studied. But he hated it, so he quit!
Why doesn’t that sound familiar?
He was what used to be called comfortable—an amorphous term that might mean anything from loaded to able to slide by to the end without having to worry. Parents were from West Chester, and Gian Carlo Menotti, with Latin volubility, described it as a cesspool covered with a thin but unbreakable layer of gentility. Drinking, incest—the old story.
At age 9 or so, he writes a letter to his parents, saying “don’t tell me to go play football.” He’s already sure that he’s a composer.
Or was he? At Curtis, where his parents sent him as a high school student (guess they got that message…), he also excelled as a pianist AND a baritone. But composition won out.
He also was good with languages, which is why Curtis asked him to befriend Menotti, who knew Italian and French, but no English. So they spoke French together.
Well, I wonder about all of this because Eric, a Facebook friend, posted a clip of Leonard Slatkin conducting the famous Adagio for Strings. If you have a quarter of a century to spare, I recommend it; it’s about as slow as evolution.
Still, it was a thing to hear, this morning at four AM, when I arose with the violent urge to eat…yes, coffee ice cream.
Later in the day, I began to worry myself about Barber. The Adagio is the most famous by a light year of his work. It’s the only piece most people will ever know. Yet it’s comparatively early. What would it be, to be known for this single piece, and have the rest of your work ignored?
Well, I was forgetting Vanessa, his first opera, which was a spectacular hit. Right—not on the order of Les Miz, but the operatic equivalent. The piano concerto was well received, the violin concerto as well.
And then came the fiasco of Antony and Cleopatra. The production was terrible; parts of the score were written almost hours before the performance; the orchestra and chorus was unprepared. Apparently, the performance, which was to celebrate the opening of the Metropolitan Opera’s new home, was filled with hotshots (Imelda Marcos was there!) who couldn’t have cared less. It was broadcast on radio live, and you could hear stage hands shouting “go” or “move it.”.
Here’s Rudolf Bing, the Met’s general manager, on the ordeal:
“Not one of the stronger plays” (!) he wrote. The production was staged to gaudy excess by Franco Zeffirelli, who had also adapted Shakespeare’s play into a libretto. The opera’s huge sets broke the stage turntable in the new theater during the rehearsals-the weight of the pyramids and the sphinxes literally crushed the new stage, and in all this chazerei, Barber’s luscious music got lost (Leontyne Price was trapped inside a pyramid and her displeasure is evident in a TV film made during rehearsals).
Savvy readers of this blog will pick up a little fact more important—sorry, Leontyne!—than Price being trapped in a pyramid. Go back, and check that little fact thrown away in a relative clause.
Zeffirelli wrote the libretto.
What?!
Franco Zeffirelli?
Why did Barber permit it? His reputation was secure, and his finances as well. Why did he accept this commission when he knew that Vanessa had taken him five years to write, and he needed to produce Antony in two? What was he thinking of—the sharp, gifted man who was, by the way, acutely sensitive to text?
It almost seems a death wish, in fact, it all but literally was. He ended his decade-long relationship with Menotti, he drank heavily, he fell into depression. A friend who was in musical circles in the 70’s in New York told me that his parties were, well, both famous and infamous.
As I read about the Adagio, I came across a perceptive article entitled “The Saddest Music Ever Written: The Story of Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings.” The author disputes the common theory that Barber’s homosexuality had anything to do with his deep melancholy. Menotti was welcomed by Barber’s parents, friends, associates. They lived together for many years. Why should it matter, then?
But I wonder. A highly sensitive man, who has fought and suffered and lived a quiet, seemly life—a life worthy of West Chester, Pennsylvania—hits the 60’s and what happens? His world, for which he has paid dearly, collapses. Women are burning bras, not taking Valium washed down with vodka. Blacks are demanding jobs other than porters on the railroad.
Gay men are holding hands on the street.
He had paid too much, gotten too little.
Wouldn’t you reach for the bottle?
"Strange, but the Adagio in the string quartet version becomes both more personal and almost redemptive at the end...."
