On August 5, 1936, the 26-year-old
Samuel Barber wrote from Austria
to his composition teacher, Rosario Scalero,
“And of course, I am composing…
Have started a string quartet: but how difficult it is!
It seems that since we have so assiduously forced
our personalities on Music- on Music, who never asked for them!
- we have lost elegance; and if we cannot recapture elegance,
the quartet form has escaped us forever. It is a struggle”.
What soon emerged as the first movement
of his new quartet in B Minor, Opus 11, was something
more than elegance, however.
The movement, Molto Allegro e Appasionato,
very lively and with passion, is the work of a young, gifted composer
showing his craft in a somewhat conservative but modern idiom.
There is great longing, urgency and lyricism
in this movement but not a hint as to what will follow.
As the summer ended, the quartet was still not finished.
But on September 16, Barber wrote
to Orlando Cole, the cellist of the Curtis String Quartet.
“I have just finished the slow movement of my quartet today.
It is a knockout”. A knockout, indeed!
The slow movement, Molto Adagio
or very slow, and in the uncommon key of B Flat Minor,
turned out to be one of the
most deeply moving works ever written.
Slow, stately, solemn, sorrowful, at times
anguished, the movement seems to
contain some ancient or perhaps
even timeless wisdom. Although originally
for string quartet, the work has become
world famous in its string orchestra adaptation
as Adagio for Strings. Barber was himself
a singer with a lovely baritone voice
and perhaps his vocal background was key
to the wordless choral feel of this music.
The movement opens with a slow, extended melody,
slightly varied with each repetition,
intermixed with sustained chords
that build to a powerful and anguished climax,
and then quickly diminish into one last
reprieve of the melody before dying away
and ending in utter quiet. Barber told Cole
who much later told me that he wrote the movement
almost in a trance and as if he were
channeling the creative spirit directly.
“And now on to the Finale,” he wrote Cole.
But the Finale would almost be his undoing.
Perhaps the gods were jealous of the sublime masterpiece
he had created and the ease with which it had happened.
“There seems to be a hoodoo over it,”
Barber complained of the last movement.
He withdrew his first try at a Finale
after its initial performances, withdrew a second version later,
and finally settled on a short reprise of first movement material,
making the Quartet feel somewhat like a two movement work
with an extended coda to it. Our Guarneri String Quartet
had access to the original last movement housed at the Curtis
Institute of Music’s library at the time.
Having performed the Barber Quartet often in its final version,
we were curious about the succession
of last movements Barber composed.
If as Barber maintained, the slow movement rolled
from his ear to paper with ease,
we could sense his struggle and
discomfort in our read through.
He had been wise to cast it aside.
In the battle over new versus old,
critics have often condemned Barber’s String Quartet
as conservative, old fashioned,
and worst of all, accessible to the public.
The American composer Ned Rorem
believes the Adagio for Strings dispels
two myths about music: that what
is popular is necessarily junk, and that
the late improves on the early.
"If Barber later aimed higher, he
never aimed deeper into the heart…” Rorem believed.
May all music, accessible or not, have the good fortune
to aim as deeply into the heart
as Samuel Barber’s String Quartet does.
[MUSIC]
Written during the years before World War II,
Barber’s String Quartet, op. 11
tugs at the heart strings as few
pieces from that period could.
A neo-romantic who loved melody,
tonality and classical form, Barber
was an anomaly as composers
from that era go. In this work,
he looks to the past while others
sought to revolutionize music through innovation.
Few 20th century works, however,
have captured the public’s attention as well
as the Adagio movement from this work.
Here, emotional power trumps all.
Barber restores faith in the communicative power
of melody, simple rhythms, and tonal harmony.
Originally a three movement work,
Barber struggled to make the final movement just right.
After a couple of revisions that took seven years of effort,
he decided to withdraw the movement
and simply add a reprise of the first movement’s material.
This cyclical return of this material after the second movement
creates a compelling overall structure, but there is an
additional element of interest. The thematic return
of the 1st movement material at the very end of the work
was made possible because Barber extracted part
of the original first movement’s turbulent
conclusion for use at the very end of the work.
By removing it, he had no choice but to change
the way the first movement ends. It closes quietly and abruptly
to make way for the 2nd movement.
So, the quartet has a special composite form.
It's no longer a three movement work,
but a two movement work in which the transcendent
Adagio movement interrupts the first.
In this regard, the Adagio is a movement within a movement.
Arnold SteinhardtPerformance Faculty
Dr. Mia ChungInstructor of Interpretive Analysis
