I'll continue my investigation of Ralph Vaughan Williams in two weeks. But since we're discussing Prop 8 and DOMA this week, I figured I should go with a composer who would have been affected by both of these, and Samuel Barber (1910-1981), I thought, would fit the bill exceedingly well. Here he is with his, as a number of net sources put this, friend and lifelong companion Gian Carlo Menotti in a picture from LIFE magazine, probably during the 1950s.
As Mr. Menotti's obituary in the New York Times put it
At Curtis, Mr. Menotti began perhaps the decisive partnership of his life — with the American composer Samuel Barber. They lived, traveled and worked together intermittently until Mr. Barber’s death in 1981.
Lived in a house together too, for 30 years, but,
as Donal Henahan wrote in Barber's obituary, same newspaper,
but in recent years Mr. Barber had been living by himself in a Fifth Avenue apartment.
And the cemetery plot next to Barber's was reserved for Menotti, only Menotti isn't buried in it, because the son Menotti adopted in the 1970s decided Menotti should be buried in Scotland. So there we are.
Okay, nothing definite, but let's be real. We can listen to some music now.
Barber, as you likely know, wrote in the twentieth century but he was not a modernist composer in the way Claude Debussy was. In his sketchbook, he wrote
I myself wrote always as I wished, and without as tremendous desire to find the latest thing possible,
and so he did. Not so unusual. Ralph Vaughan Williams, for instance. American music, like American art, went through a period of realism in the 1930s, and so we have Roy Harris and William Shuman, and in Germany Richard Strauss had rejected the innovations of Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg (the possibility unfortunately exists that this was political on Strauss's part) and published the work that this is part of in 1948, sung by Soile Isokoski, a Finnish soprano you need to know about:
Fruhling: Isokoski, Sakari Oramo, Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra.
Barber knew he wanted to be a composer at a very early age. He received his earliest training from his uncle, Sidney Homer. Uncle by marriage, married to Barber's mother's sister, Louise Homer. If you're an opera queen, your eyes just lit up, as this was one of the great contraltos who sang roles like Azucena in Il Trovatore, Amneris in Aida, and Ortrud in Lohengrin at the Metropolitan Opera in New York between 1900 and 1930. Not the best representation at YouTube, so we'll pass. She sang some of her nephew's earliest works, too.
Barber was one of the first students at the Curtis Institute of Music when it opened in 1924, and that's where he met Menotti, also a student. His first major success came when he was 21 when he composed his Overture to The School for Scandal, (Richard Brinsley Sheridan)here performed by the New York Philharmonic conducted by Victor de Sabata. It's an energetic piece of music, orchestrated well and listen to what happens at about 1:57. So you can see that this is REALLY not a modernist experiment, that's an oboe, not an English horn.
It's also not distinctively Barber, the way you can tell if something is by Vaughan Williams or Prokofiev. If you know it's by Barber, you know it's Barber.
So to our main event. The Violin Concerto was Barber's first major commission, and the patron was Samuel Fels, the manufacturer of Fels-Naptha Soap and a member of the Curtis Institute's board. He commissioned it for his adopted son, Ivo Briselli, a child prodigy. Barber wrote the concerto during the summer of 1939, in Switzerland and, after all Americans were ordered out of Europe, in Pennsylvania. Briselli was picky and Barber wasn't having any of it. It was first played by the violinist Herbert Baumel, a Curtis student, with the Curtis Institute Orchestra, Fritz Reiner conducting, and in February 1941 Albert Spalding performed it with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy. The critics liked the first and second movements but felt the third movement was too short. Virgil Thomson wrote that
the only reason Barber gets away with elementary musical methods is that his heart is pure.
So yes, tonal. The orchestra: two each of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, and trumpets, timpani, snare drum, piano, and strings. The piano is an interesting addition.
From Wikipedia, Barber's notes:
The first movement — allegro molto moderato — begins with a lyrical first subject announced at once by the solo violin, without any orchestral introduction. This movement as a whole has perhaps more the character of a sonata than concerto form. The second movement — andante sostenuto — is introduced by an extended oboe solo. The violin enters with a contrasting and rhapsodic theme, after which it repeats the oboe melody of the beginning. The last movement, a perpetuum mobile, exploits the more brilliant and virtuosic character of the violin.
We can see if the three movements do what he says they do.
First Movement: Allegro; Gil Shaham, Andre Previn, London Symphony Orchestra
Except for the fact that the violin is indeed accompanied throughout (at the beginning, by the lower strings and the French horns, and then by the piano), sure, only I'm not sure why he thinks this isn't in concerto form, unless he thinks that in concerto form the solo instrument is silent for longer than he lets the violin be silent in this movement.
Second Movement: Andante; Hilary Hahn, Hugh Wolff, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra
Extended oboe solo, then extended clarinet and flute duet. The violin enters at about 2:46, which is a long time for it to be absent. Nice, melodic movement, not too complicated, and it ends in a whisper just like the first movement did.
Third Movement: Presto in moto perpetuo; James Ehnes, Bramwell Tovey, Vancouver Symphony Orchestra
Not with a whisper this time. Agitato throughout, and if it's not the violin, it's the string section and the horns, and isn't it fun the way he uses the piano as just another instrument.
I can see why this is the most performed of Barber's works outside of the Adagio for Strings, which again I'm not going to play for you. You can tell it was written in the twentieth century, but stylistically it's very easy to listen to. Barber's work would get somewhat more complex and I might return to it for some of the material he wrote in the 1950s and 1960s, but we're going back to RVW in two weeks for the London Symphony.
My source for much of this was Barbara B. Heyman, Samuel Barber: The Composer and his Music. Much more about the music, with lots of excerpts from scores and from Barber's manuscripts, than about the life after 1930.