Barber String Quartet program notes
The path chosen by Pennsylvania born Samuel Barber was one of unabashed conservatism. He believed that the musical language and palette of the Romantic era still had the potential to surprise and produce new ideas. While the intellectual school of composers who subscribed to Schoenberg‟s “serial” method of composing labeled Barber as an anachronistic fossil, he stayed true to his aesthetic vision and produced many works that resonated with the public. One work, in particular, was elevated to iconic status when Barber was all of 28 years old. The powerfully spiritual “Adagio for Strings” is familiar to most people even if they can’t name the piece they are listening to. This emotional work premiered on an NBC radio broadcast on November 5, 1938 with Arturo Toscanini conducting. The work is thought to embody feelings of profound loss and grief. It was played at the funerals of Franklin Delanor Roosevelt and Albert Einstein; it was broadcast to the nation when John F. Kennedy was assassinated; and it was played by orchestras around the globe in the wake of the 9/11 tragedies. It has been featured on commercials and in soundtracks to motion pictures, most famously Oliver Stone‟s 1986 Vietnam War film, “Platoon.” The works power is in its simplicity and depth of feeling. With its stepwise sinews of b-flat minor, woven together in a large dramatic arch, there are few works like the “Adagio” that have such direct access to people‟s emotions.
However, most people who could actually name Barber‟s “Adagio” from hearing it probably are not aware that the piece is an arrangement from the second movement of his string quartet from 1936. While some interpretations of the “Adagio” can sound positively Mahlerian in sound, Barber himself originally intended for the “Adagio” to be an intimate experience for string quartet. Additionally, as a middle movement, he intended there to be music before and after it. What about the rest of the piece? How did the quartet come about? It seems that even a composer as distinguished, refined and erudite as Samuel Barber found humor in the old fashioned “poop joke.” Ironically, a work that possesses the sublime “Adagio” had a rather scatological beginning! The quartet is first mentioned in a letter to the cellist Orlando Cole on May 6, 1936. Barber writes, “I have vague quartettish rumblings in my innards and need a bit of celestial Ex Lax to restore my equilibrium; there is nothing to do but get at it, and I will send the excrements to you by registered mail by August…” This letter was written from Rome where the 26 year old Barber had just spent a year studying at the American Academy in the ancient city, thanks to a Prix de Rome scholarship he had received in the Spring of 1935. Barber was aware that Orlando Cole’s quartet, the Curtis Quartet, was planning a European tour in the late months of 1936 and he wanted to write a quartet for them to play in Italy. Thanks to an extension of his traveling Pulitzer fellowship, he was able to remain in Europe for the summer and into the fall of 1936. Barber, along with his colleague and partner Gian Carlo Menotti, lived in a cabin in the town of St. Wolfgang, Austria, for five months. It was a blissful summer of solitude for the two young composers and they were able to work uninterrupted. “We are very inaccessible and able to work in peace…” Barber would write to Cole on July 15. It was in this cabin in St. Wolfgang where the majority of the quartet was composed. The first and second movements were put down on paper without much strain from the young composer. In a letter to Cole from the late summer, Barber was feeling quite optimistic about the quartet’s middle movement. As biographer Barbara Heyman points out in her seminal biography of Barber, “On 19 September, with uncanny prescience about a work that in its orchestral arrangement would be considered one of the sublime masterpieces of the twentieth century, Barber announced to Cole, ‘I have just finished the slow movement of my quartet today—it is a knockout! Now for a finale.'” [Read Jesse’s 2009 post about interviewing Barbara Heyman, and listen to some of his interview with her, by clicking here.] Performance of Barber’s “Adagio” by the Choir of Trinity College (Cambridge, England) For most composers, the seemingly harmless four words, “now for a finale” have proven to be easier said than done. It seems that if your name is Bach, Beethoven, Brahms or Boulez, you have struggled at some point in wrapping up your piece with an effective finale. Barber was certainly no exception and the final movement of his quartet proved to be a thorn in his side for years. Even with the quartet going swimmingly in mid-summer, Barber knew that the quartet would not be ready for the Curtis Quartet’s tour of Europe. In a letter to Cole on the last day of August 1936, Barber wrote to Cole, “It is coming along slowly, but will not be ready in time. The best thing will probably be for me to have it tried out by the Rome quartet in rehearsal, and then I can send it over to you from Rome.” Undoubtedly, Barber was disappointed that his friends, the Curtis Quartet, were not going to be able to premiere the new quartet. Felix Lamond, the head of Composition at the American Academy in Rome, had already engaged the Belgian Pro Arte Quartet for the job. This did not please Barber as he had recently heard a recording of the Schubert Cello Quintet with the Pro Arte and he found it very unsatisfactory. The premiere went ahead on December 14 in Rome at the Villa Aurelia, one day after the premiere of his First Symphony also in Rome by the Philharmonic Augusteo Orchestra. He had finished the final movement in time for the premiere but was dissatisfied and retracted it for revision immediately following the performance. A trip back to the United States from January 15 to April 24, 1937 for the American premiere of his 1st Symphony with the Cleveland Orchestra under Artur Rodzinsky put the revisions on hold. For years, the third movement continued to be a peccadillo for Barber. After an important performance at the Library of Congress on April 20, 1937 by the Gordon Quartet and several performances from the Curtis Quartet around America, Barber finally gave up and scrapped the final movement all together. Very telling is a review by Howard Taubman of The New York Times from a performance by the Curtis Quartet in Town Hall on March 15, 1938. Taubman felt that the first movement showed “virility and dramatic impact” and the second movement was, “the finest of the work, deeply felt and written with economy, resourcefulness and distinction.” The last movement did not receive such praise, being in Taubman‟s words, “a scrappy working out of unexciting ideas….” The Quartet’s finale ended up being a cut-and-paste job. Barber literally cut the ending from the first movement and pasted it as a postscript to the second movement. Actually, the Quartet in its ultimate form does not possess a finale per se. The original ending to the first movement is to be played attaca after the second movement. In sense, the quartet is a lopsided palindrome. The premiere of the quartet in its final form was given by the Budapest Quartet at the Library of Congress in January of 1943. The Providence String Quartet has received permission from the Curtis Institute of Music and Barber’s publisher, G. Schirmer, to perform the original finale. 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