Samuel Barber

Samuel Osmond Barber II (March 9, 1910 – January 23, 1981) was an American composer, pianist, conductor, baritone, and music educator, and one of the most celebrated composers of the mid-20th century.

Also widely performed is his Knoxville: Summer of 1915 (1947), a setting for soprano and orchestra of a prose text by James Agee.

At the time of Barber's death, nearly all of his compositions had been recorded.

Many of his compositions were commissioned or first performed by such noted groups and artists as the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Opera, Vladimir Horowitz, Eleanor Steber, Raya Garbousova, John Browning, Leontyne Price, Pierre Bernac, Francis Poulenc, and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.

While Barber composed a significant body of purely instrumental music, two-thirds of his compositional output was art songs for voice and piano, choral music, and songs for voice and orchestra.

Principally influenced by nine years' composition studies with Rosario Scalero at the Curtis Institute and more than 25 years' study with his uncle, the composer Sidney Homer, Barber's music usually eschewed the experimental trends of musical modernism in favor of traditional 19th-century harmonic language and formal structure embracing lyricism and emotional expression.

Following his graduation from high school in 1928, he entered the adult professional program at Curtis from which he graduated in 1934.

At Curtis he studied piano with George Frederick Boyle and Isabelle Vengerova, composition with Rosario Scalero, conducting with Fritz Reiner, and voice with Emilio de Gogorza.

In 1928, he met fellow Curtis schoolmate Gian Carlo Menotti, who became his partner in life as well as in their shared profession.

During his last year at Curtis he became a favorite of the conservatory's founder, Mary Louise Curtis Bok.

In 1935, Barber recorded his own setting of Arnold's "Dover Beach" for NBC, singing the vocal part accompanied by string quartet, and he was also featured weekly on NBC Radio in 1935–1936 performing German lieder and art songs.

In particular, his Adagio for Strings (1936) has earned a permanent place in the orchestral concert repertory, as has that work's adaptation for chorus, Agnus Dei (1967).

Some of his most frequently performed songs include both the solo voice and choral versions of Sure on this shining night (solo version from 1938 and choral version from 1961) with text by Agee; and the song cycle Hermit Songs (1953), with anonymous texts by Irish monks from the eighth through thirteenth centuries.

This emphasis on sung material was rooted in his own brief career as a professional baritone in his 20s which inspired a lifelong love of vocal music.

However, he adopted elements of modernism after 1940 in some of his compositions, such as an increased use of dissonance and chromaticism in the Cello Concerto (1945) and Medea's Dance of Vengeance (1955); and the use of tonal ambiguity and a narrow use of serialism in his Piano Sonata (1949), Prayers of Kierkegaard (1954), and Nocturne (1959).

Barber was adept at both instrumental and vocal music.

His works became successful on the international stage and many of his compositions enjoyed rapid adoption into the classical performance canon.

He also occasionally conducted performances and recordings of his works with symphony orchestras during the 1950s, and taught composition at the Curtis Institute from 1939 to 1942.

Barber was in a relationship with the composer Gian Carlo Menotti for more than 40 years.

They lived at Capricorn, a house just north of New York City, where they frequently hosted parties with academic and music luminaries.

Menotti was Barber's librettist for two of his three operas.

He received the Pulitzer Prize for Music twice: for his opera Vanessa (1956–57), and for the Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (1962).

When the relationship ended in 1970, they remained close friends until Barber's death from cancer in 1981.

Barber was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania, the son of Marguerite McLeod (née Beatty) and Samuel Le Roy Barber.

He was born into a comfortable, educated, social, and distinguished American family.

His father was a physician; his mother was a pianist of English-Scottish-Irish descent whose family had lived in the United States since the time of the American Revolutionary War.

His maternal aunt, Louise Homer, was a leading contralto at the Metropolitan Opera; his uncle, Sidney Homer, was a composer of American art songs.

Louise Homer is known to have influenced Barber's interest in voice.

Through his aunt, Barber was introduced to many great singers and songs.

Sidney Homer mentored Barber for more than 25 years, and profoundly influenced his compositional aesthetics.

At a very early age, Barber became profoundly interested in music, and it was apparent that he had great musical talent and ability.

He began studying the piano at the age of six and at age seven composed his first work, Sadness, a 23-measure solo piano piece in C minor.

Despite Barber's interest in music, his family wanted him to become a typical extroverted, athletic American boy.

This meant, in particular, they encouraged his playing football.

However, Barber was in no way a typical boy, and at the age of nine he wrote to his mother:

"Dear Mother: I have written this to tell you my worrying secret. Now don't cry when you read it because it is neither yours nor my fault. I suppose I will have to tell it now without any nonsense. To begin with I was not meant to be an athlet [sic]. I was meant to be a composer, and will be I'm sure. I'll ask you one more thing.—Don't ask me to try to forget this unpleasant thing and go play football.—Please—Sometimes I've been worrying about this so much that it makes me mad (not very)."

At the age of 10, Barber wrote his first operetta, The Rose Tree, to a libretto by the family's cook.

At the age of 12, he became an organist at a local church.

At the age of 14, Barber entered the youth artist program at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where he ultimately spent ten years developing his talents as a triple prodigy in composition, voice, and piano.

During his initial studies at Curtis, he simultaneously attended and graduated from West Chester High School (now West Chester Henderson High School), during which time he composed his school's alma mater which is still in use today.