Samuel Barber

Barber’s Overture to “The School for Scandal”: Reflecting a Playful Spirit

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Composed in 1931, the Overture to The School for Scandal, Op. 5 was Samuel Barber’s first orchestral work. Barber was completing studies at the Curtis Institute of Music, and the piece served as a graduation thesis. Two years later on August 30, 1933, it was premiered by the Philadelphia Orchestra, conducted by Alexander Smallens. The eight-minute-long concert overture appeared on programs across the country, helping to establish Barber as one of the …

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Barber’s “To Be Sung on the Water”: Conspirare

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Themes of loneliness, isolation, and loss emerge in the late works of Samuel Barber. One of the most poignant examples can be heard in To Be Sung on the Water, Op. 42, an a cappella setting of a poem by Louise Bogan (1897-1970). Composed in December of 1968, the music unfolds over an ostinato which suggests the gentle, hypnotic motion of a rowboat through the night. We become aware of the persistent flow …

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Barber’s Toccata Festiva: A Celebratory Flourish for Organ and Orchestra

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On a day in 1960, Mary Curtis Zimbalist phoned Eugene Ormandy, music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, with exciting news. The wealthy patron and founder of Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music had decided to provide the Academy of Music, the orchestra’s home at the time, with a pipe organ. Additionally, Zimbalist would commission Samuel Barber, the esteemed American composer who had enrolled in Curtis’ first class in 1924, to write a piece …

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Barber’s Cello Sonata: Echoes of Brahms

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Imagine the kind of music Johannes Brahms might have written had he lived into the twentieth century. Chances are good that it might have sounded something like Samuel Barber’s Cello Sonata, Op. 6. The Sonata’s harmonic language is firmly rooted in the twentieth century, even as it renounces the prevailing twelve tone atonality in favor of C minor. At the same time, its melodic construction, deep, rich piano voicing, and Romantic pathos …

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Barber’s Cello Concerto: Music Which Stands on Its Own Terms

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Lushly Romantic, nostalgic, and autumnal, Samuel Barber’s Cello Concerto, Op. 22 has, in recent years, begun to emerge from the shadows of obscurity. Completed in November of 1945, around the time of Barber’s discharge from wartime service in the United States Air Force, it is the second of the composer’s three concerti, bookended by the Violin Concerto (1939) and Piano Concerto (1962). The work’s neglect has been attributed to its extreme technical …

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Barber’s “Summer Music” for Wind Quintet: A Soundtrack for Languid Days

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With the title, Summer Music, Samuel Barber did not have anything specifically programmatic in mind. Instead, the single movement piece for wind quintet conveys a general atmosphere. Barber said, “It’s supposed to be evocative of summer—summer meaning languid, not killing mosquitoes.” Indeed, the lazy opening moments of Summer Music are enveloped in haze and humidity. Fleeting blues strains combine with primal echoes of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. As the piece continues, the musical conversation among …

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Samuel Barber’s Capricorn Concerto: An Homage to the Baroque

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Completed in 1944, Samuel Barber’s Capricorn Concerto for Flute, Oboe, Trumpet, and Strings is a twentieth century homage to the Baroque concerto grosso. This is the form in which solo instrumental voices engage in contrapuntal conversation with one another, and with a full ensemble. It is a thrilling dialogue which plays on the contrast between large (grosso) and intimate forces. Barber’s scoring mirrors the instrumentation of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2. The Capricorn …

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