Has the thought ever occurred to you that the author/composer/performer of a famous work has a life that’s totally separate from that work? It’s one of those obvious-but-overlooked kind of things. For example, I remember wondering about the life of Sir John Tavener back when my choir sang “The Lamb” for a Christmas concert. He had said about that piece, “‘The Lamb’ came to me fully grown and was written in an afternoon and dedicated to my nephew Simon for his 3rd birthday.” The piece became extremely popular, so much so that there are probably many people who automatically associate Tavener with this piece when they hear his name, just as they associate Beethoven with “dah-dah-dah-DAH.” (Well, Beethoven’s Fifth may be a little more well known.) Or Handel with “The Hallelujah Chorus.” I was particularly struck with the Tavener story because he spent so little time actually writing the piece (if he’s telling the truth, and I assume he is). One afternoon’s effort changed his life, forever associating him with that piece.
So it is with Samuel Barber and the “Adagio for Strings.” If you know anything at all about classical music and you run across Barber’s name, nine times out of ten you’ll think of the “Adagio.” And the piece is rightly recognized as not only a masterpiece, but one of the top masterpieces of all time, even as “the saddest piece ever written.” But it’s sadly fair to say that Barber never achieved anywhere near the same recognition for the many other fine pieces he wrote. Can you imagine how frustrating that would be? You’d be almost tempted to wear a sandwich board that said, “I’ve Written More than the ‘Adagio’!” People would regard you as a specimen frozen in amber, when you were really out there beavering away at new works. You don’t just write something successful and then sit there with your hands folded for the rest of your life, watching the royalties roll in, not if you’re a normal person anyway.
Well, what is the story behind the “Adagio”? First off, it wasn’t originally written as a stand-alone but as the second movement of Barber’s String Quartet Op. 11. While Barber never said much if anything regarding the inspiration for the piece, his lifelong partner Gian Carol Menotti (they met at the Curtis Institute when both were students there) said that Barber had encountered the following passage in Virgil’s Georgics:
A breast-shaped curve of wave begins to whiten
And rise above the surface, then rolling on
Gathers and gathers until it reaches land
Huge as a mountain and crashes among the rocks
With a prodigious roar, and what was deep
Comes churning up from the bottom in mighty swirls.
The year was 1936. Menotti and Barber were living in Austria at the time; Hitler had come to power three years earlier. The wave was beginning to whiten, as it were. But this Barber work might never have come to be so popular had it not been for Arturo Toscanini, the great Italian conductor. He heard some of Barber’s work and asked him to write a couple of short pieces for performance by the NBC Symphony, which Toscanini had begun directing after moving to the US from Italy in the wake of Mussolini’s rise to power. So Barber re-worked the second movement of the quartet into an orchestral version and sent it and another short piece off to the temperamental Italian in January 1938. Shortly afterward Toscanini returned both manuscripts to Barber without comment. Barber was miffed, figuring that Toscanini didn’t like the music. But no! Toscanini had memorized both the pieces and so didn’t need the written music any longer. (I’m a little puzzled by this story, aren’t you? The orchestra needed the music! It’s reported that Toscanini didn’t look at the music again until the day of the performance, but there has to be more to the story than that. I’ve consulted numerous sources for and they all just repeat this same version. Did Toscanini get the parts copied before he sent it back to Barber? I’m thinking that he must have done so. But no one will tell me for sure, so there it is.)
Anyway, the piece was broadcast as part of a concert in November 1938 and just took off. It first began to be associated with death and funerals when it was played on the radio at the announcement of FDR’s death in 1945, leading to a long string of famous people whose deaths were associated with it, including John F. Kennedy, Albert Einstein, Princess Grace and Princess Diana. It popped up in films, was re-arranged in many different styles, and even appeared in The Simpsons and South Park. (Sigh.) But, as I said at the outset, Barber kept writing music. He was, after all, only 28 at the time of the “Adagio” premier. His later life was pretty unhappy, as he was devastated by the poor reception of his opera Antony and Cleopatra in 1966. We are told that “Barber never quite got over it, and for the rest of his life he virtually lost his will to compose. . . . ‘What I wrote and what I envisioned had nothing to do with what one saw on that stage,’ Barber later told the writer John Gruen.” He sank into depression and alcoholism, living in isolation for much of the time. In spite of all this unhappiness, though, he did manage to produce at least some additional music. I’d like to find out more about all this, as the sources I found don’t seem to agree completely. It’s very hard to boil someone’s life down into a short article!
Well, whatever the merits or demerits of Barber’s other works, it seems clear that the “Adagio” has an innate quality that gave it such prominence. Sure, it got off to a great start because of the Toscanini broadcast, and there are many artistic endeavors that deserve the same publicity but never get it. Mediocrity usually drops from sight, though, eventually. Barber did lament the fact that his other words never gained much popularity, but one can’t feel too bad for him.
In the meantime, I’m giving you a panoply of videos:
First, the original music from the second movement of Barber’s String Quartet:
Then, since this is after all a choral music blog, here’s Barber’s gorgeous, gorgeous arrangement for choir, using the same tune and the words of the Agnus Dei:
Then (and I don’t really like this, but it just shows how Barber’s tune has been used in pop music) a video that has an unbelievable number of views (with this and another one well over 100 million):
:But wait! There’s more! I just couldn’t resist posting this video. I was reading an article about Barber in the music section of the NYT and saw a post at the bottom about “Mongolian throat-singing heavy metal band”–so I had to click on it, of course. M-a-a-a-a-a-n! What a super, super cool group! What can you say about throat-singing, traditional instruments and lyrics, heavy metal drumming, and a Mongolian biker gang? I mean to say, this has it all. (Anybody know how they’re doing that vocal technique?)
© Debi Simons
