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Samuel Barber: His Life and Legacy
A pivotal twentieth-century composer, Samuel Barber earned a long list of honors and accolades that included two Pulitzer Prizes for Music and the public support of conductors like Arturo Toscanini, Serge Koussevitzky, and Leonard Bernstein. Barber’s works have since become standard concert repertoire and continue to flourish across high art and popular culture. Acclaimed biographer Howard Pollack ( Aaron Copland , George Gershwin ) offers a multifaceted account of Barber’s life and music while placing the artist in his social and cultural milieu. Born into a musical family, Barber pursued his artistic ambitions from childhood. Pollack follows Barber’s path from his precocious youth through a career where, from the start, the composer consistently received prizes, fellowships, and other recognition. Stylistic analyses of works like the Adagio for Strings , the Violin Concerto, Summer of 1915 for voice and orchestra, the Piano Concerto, and the operas Vanessa and Antony and Cleopatra , stand alongside revealing accounts of the music’s commissioning, performance, reception, and legacy. Throughout, Pollack weaves in accounts of Barber’s encounters with colleagues like Aaron Copland and Francis Poulenc, performers from Eleanor Steber and Leontyne Price to Vladimir Horowitz and Van Cliburn, patrons, admirers, and a wide circle of eminent friends and acquaintances. He also provides an eloquent portrait of the composer’s decades-long relationship with the renowned opera composer Gian Carlo Menotti. Informed by new interviews and immense archival research, Samuel Barber is a long-awaited critical and personal biography of a monumental figure in twentieth-century American music.
- GenresMusic
744 pages, Hardcover
Published April 4, 2023
About the author
Howard Pollack
15 books3 followersHoward Pollack is John and Rebecca Moores Professor of Music at the University of Houston, where he has taught since 1987.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
June 24, 2023
Howard Pollack, the author of SAMUEL BARBER: HIS LIFE & LEGACY, is overwhelmingly guilty of one of the most common vices of biographers: the inclusion of any detail for no better reason than that the biographer was able to unearth it. Am I supposed to care where the wife of one of Barber’s early teachers was born, or that she had a rather oddly located birthmark? I’m jesting there, but it does seem that if Pollack could get the measurement of a birthmark, he would include that too.
If you can get through all the extraneous detail (Pollack appears to have no sense of the extraneous), the book does afford occasional rewards and revelations.
At the age of eight, Barber wrote to his mother: “NOTICE to Mother, and nobody else — 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 and forget this unpleasant thing and go play football. — Please — Some-times (sic) I’ve ben worrying about this so much that it makes me mad (not very). Love, SAM BARBER”
Many commentators have interpreted this letter as an early instance of coming out as homosexual. At any rate, Barber was giving his first piano recital by the age of ten.
I clapped my hands when I read that as a young student hearing Wagner’s TRISTAN UND ISOLDE for the first time, Barber pronounced it “alternately thrilling and boring.” A little later: “Any love for the monarch of Bayreuth, whom I once may have cherished, is now quite definitely vanished, and his only effect on me is a wiggling boredom.”
Writing guardedly to his family in May 1929 about his school “friend” Gian Carlo Menotti, who became his lover, young Barber observed : “He is quite perfect; at close range the defects become delights.”
When Barber and Menotti spent time with legendary conductor Arturo Toscanini after they graduated from Curtis Institute, Toscanini played through the score of Monteverdi’s ORFEO, with the conductor playing the role of Eurydice and Barber singing the part of Orfeo. Oh, to have been there!
At the world premiere of Barber ’s First Symphony in Rome in 1936, Barber later in life recalled that the work met with “fifty percent applause and fifty percent hissing. I remember standing in the wings wondering whether I was supposed to go out again and the old doorman said, ‘Uh-uh, better not — the hisses win.’” (That’s Barber’s account. According to the Rome press, the audience called Barber out with applause three times and the hissing began only when Menotti and others in attendance tried to bring him back out a fourth time.)
In the 1960s, a supervisor at the phone company refused to give Barber a new phone number over the phone, saying it would have to be mailed to him. When Barber persisted, she said she would give him the number if he could sing the opening phrase of “Still On This Shining Night” (Barber’s setting of a poem by James Agee). He sang it, and she gave him the number. In an interview with The New York Times, Barber said, “I’m afraid I sounded nervous. I had never suing for the telephone company before.” It’s difficult to imagine an “art song” having that degree of popularity and familiarity today.
For this reader, one of the pleasures of biography is discovering individuals and events that have been lost in history. In 1941, returning to their apartment from the Metropolitan Opera, Barber and Menotti encountered 19-year-old poet Robert William Horan, who ended up living with them in a menage a trois for about a decade. Horan’s collection of poetry A BEGINNING was selected by W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. He was at one time a lover of Pauline Kael, the noted film critic.
When Barber was wanting to write an opera and looking for a librettist, someone suggested adapting Tennessee Williams’ A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE. In declining this suggestion, Barber wrote: “The texture of the poetic language of Tennessee Williams is adequate in itself, and leaves no room for music.” When Andre Previn later took up the task, in my judgment the language dominated the proceedings.
I almost consistently find modern operas unsatisfactory when it comes to vocal composition. I was intrigued by Barber’s observation shortly after the1958 launching of his opera VANESSA: “I studied singing too long not to know that the distance between one note and another in the human voice is enormous — thousands of light years. Just between E and F. Most composers today, very good ones when they write for the orchestra, do not know this.”
When producer/designer Oliver Smith tried to persuade Barber’s neighbor Tallulah Bankhead to be in a Broadway production of Jean Paul Sartre’s NO EXIT, she declined, calling the play “stupid.” According to Pollack, at the time Bankhead was more interested in sexual pursuit of author Jane Bowles. (This is the sort of juicy, Post-It gossip that keeps me reading biographies.)
When dancer/choreographer Martha Graham performed as Medea in her dance Cave of the Heart, with orchestration by Barber, the natives in Burma “bestowed on her a phrase descriptive of a mad elephant who goes amok.”
According to composer Ned Rorem, when writer Joe LeSueur briefly went to work for Menotti as his secretary in 1957, Menotti sought his opinion of an opera he was working on. “Well, mmmm, it sounds as though something terrible is gong to happen,” LeSueur ventured. When LeSueur told this to poet Frank O’Hara, O’Hara said, “Something terrible IS going to happen. He’s going to finish it.” (Pollack suggests that this story may have been somewhat fabricated by Rorem.)
When Maria Callas, originally slated to sing the title role in Barber’s VANESSA at its Metropolitan Opera premiere, heard Barber play and sing the score, she declined the offer, saying, “There is no melody in this opera. That is the trouble with all you modern composers.”
In 1966, the Met opened its new opera house at Lincoln Center with a production of Barber’s ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA, arguably the most ambitious undertaking of the composer career. When soprano Leontyne Price, in rehearsal as Cleopatra, sang on the stage of the 3,800-seat house for the first time, she later recalled thinking “You’ve got to be kidding. It was so huge. The first note I sang, thought I was singing to Staten Island.” (You have to imagine that in Price’s grande dame speaking voice.)
Critical consensus was that Franco Zeffirelli’s Cecil B. DeMille-ish sets and costumes overwhelmed the opera. A friend of Barber recalls Barber’s comment that “Leontyne’s headdress was larger than the Pyramid. It could give the dear permanent brain damage.”
Pollack devotes two chapters to ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA and argues that its place in the operatic repertory has yet to be determined. Au fond, this slogging biography is heavy on analysis of Barber’s music and disappointingly short on other aspects of his life. I confess to some skimming.
The book has a generous selection of photographs. The dust jacket cover features a photograph of Barber by Walker Evans.
If you can get through all the extraneous detail (Pollack appears to have no sense of the extraneous), the book does afford occasional rewards and revelations.
At the age of eight, Barber wrote to his mother: “NOTICE to Mother, and nobody else — 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 and forget this unpleasant thing and go play football. — Please — Some-times (sic) I’ve ben worrying about this so much that it makes me mad (not very). Love, SAM BARBER”
Many commentators have interpreted this letter as an early instance of coming out as homosexual. At any rate, Barber was giving his first piano recital by the age of ten.
I clapped my hands when I read that as a young student hearing Wagner’s TRISTAN UND ISOLDE for the first time, Barber pronounced it “alternately thrilling and boring.” A little later: “Any love for the monarch of Bayreuth, whom I once may have cherished, is now quite definitely vanished, and his only effect on me is a wiggling boredom.”
Writing guardedly to his family in May 1929 about his school “friend” Gian Carlo Menotti, who became his lover, young Barber observed : “He is quite perfect; at close range the defects become delights.”
When Barber and Menotti spent time with legendary conductor Arturo Toscanini after they graduated from Curtis Institute, Toscanini played through the score of Monteverdi’s ORFEO, with the conductor playing the role of Eurydice and Barber singing the part of Orfeo. Oh, to have been there!
At the world premiere of Barber ’s First Symphony in Rome in 1936, Barber later in life recalled that the work met with “fifty percent applause and fifty percent hissing. I remember standing in the wings wondering whether I was supposed to go out again and the old doorman said, ‘Uh-uh, better not — the hisses win.’” (That’s Barber’s account. According to the Rome press, the audience called Barber out with applause three times and the hissing began only when Menotti and others in attendance tried to bring him back out a fourth time.)
In the 1960s, a supervisor at the phone company refused to give Barber a new phone number over the phone, saying it would have to be mailed to him. When Barber persisted, she said she would give him the number if he could sing the opening phrase of “Still On This Shining Night” (Barber’s setting of a poem by James Agee). He sang it, and she gave him the number. In an interview with The New York Times, Barber said, “I’m afraid I sounded nervous. I had never suing for the telephone company before.” It’s difficult to imagine an “art song” having that degree of popularity and familiarity today.
For this reader, one of the pleasures of biography is discovering individuals and events that have been lost in history. In 1941, returning to their apartment from the Metropolitan Opera, Barber and Menotti encountered 19-year-old poet Robert William Horan, who ended up living with them in a menage a trois for about a decade. Horan’s collection of poetry A BEGINNING was selected by W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. He was at one time a lover of Pauline Kael, the noted film critic.
When Barber was wanting to write an opera and looking for a librettist, someone suggested adapting Tennessee Williams’ A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE. In declining this suggestion, Barber wrote: “The texture of the poetic language of Tennessee Williams is adequate in itself, and leaves no room for music.” When Andre Previn later took up the task, in my judgment the language dominated the proceedings.
I almost consistently find modern operas unsatisfactory when it comes to vocal composition. I was intrigued by Barber’s observation shortly after the1958 launching of his opera VANESSA: “I studied singing too long not to know that the distance between one note and another in the human voice is enormous — thousands of light years. Just between E and F. Most composers today, very good ones when they write for the orchestra, do not know this.”
When producer/designer Oliver Smith tried to persuade Barber’s neighbor Tallulah Bankhead to be in a Broadway production of Jean Paul Sartre’s NO EXIT, she declined, calling the play “stupid.” According to Pollack, at the time Bankhead was more interested in sexual pursuit of author Jane Bowles. (This is the sort of juicy, Post-It gossip that keeps me reading biographies.)
When dancer/choreographer Martha Graham performed as Medea in her dance Cave of the Heart, with orchestration by Barber, the natives in Burma “bestowed on her a phrase descriptive of a mad elephant who goes amok.”
According to composer Ned Rorem, when writer Joe LeSueur briefly went to work for Menotti as his secretary in 1957, Menotti sought his opinion of an opera he was working on. “Well, mmmm, it sounds as though something terrible is gong to happen,” LeSueur ventured. When LeSueur told this to poet Frank O’Hara, O’Hara said, “Something terrible IS going to happen. He’s going to finish it.” (Pollack suggests that this story may have been somewhat fabricated by Rorem.)
When Maria Callas, originally slated to sing the title role in Barber’s VANESSA at its Metropolitan Opera premiere, heard Barber play and sing the score, she declined the offer, saying, “There is no melody in this opera. That is the trouble with all you modern composers.”
In 1966, the Met opened its new opera house at Lincoln Center with a production of Barber’s ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA, arguably the most ambitious undertaking of the composer career. When soprano Leontyne Price, in rehearsal as Cleopatra, sang on the stage of the 3,800-seat house for the first time, she later recalled thinking “You’ve got to be kidding. It was so huge. The first note I sang, thought I was singing to Staten Island.” (You have to imagine that in Price’s grande dame speaking voice.)
Critical consensus was that Franco Zeffirelli’s Cecil B. DeMille-ish sets and costumes overwhelmed the opera. A friend of Barber recalls Barber’s comment that “Leontyne’s headdress was larger than the Pyramid. It could give the dear permanent brain damage.”
Pollack devotes two chapters to ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA and argues that its place in the operatic repertory has yet to be determined. Au fond, this slogging biography is heavy on analysis of Barber’s music and disappointingly short on other aspects of his life. I confess to some skimming.
The book has a generous selection of photographs. The dust jacket cover features a photograph of Barber by Walker Evans.
May 12, 2023
This long, detailed and meticulously researched biography of Samuel Barber critically explores his entire oeuvre and offers new perspectives on the life and the work. Authoritative and comprehensive, it offers a detailed assessment of Barber’s work. Exhaustive and occasionally exhausting – for example it even lists all those in the audience at many of the performances - it is perhaps a book for the serious music lover and music scholars of all stripes rather than the general reader. However, even the author accepts this and helpfully focuses on the life and work in different chapters, so that the less musically knowledgeable, such as myself, can read just the chapters indicated in the preface, rather than get too bogged down in musical detail. And I did find the book far too detailed. Including synopses of the operas was useful, and I enjoyed learning about the life, but overall this wasn’t really a book for me. That doesn’t prevent me appreciating it for what it is and I don’t hesitate to give it a high rating.
July 14, 2023
Topping out at over 680 pages Pollack's biography traces the life of the composer & the importance of his music to twentieth-century music. Pollack who is the John & Rebecca Moores Professor of Music at the University of Houston provides dense details about Barber's private life (his life long friendship with the Italian-American composer, GianCarlo Mennoti) & insightful analysis of his musical works. At the same time he helps contextualize all of the individuals he introduces in the book that helps the reader understand how Barber was influenced & helped influence an entire generation of American music. While a long read it is an important book that adds to the larger scholarship on Barber.
July 6, 2024
Musical Biography of Samuel Barber
Fascinating details of Barbers private and public life, as they relate to his musical works at various stages of his own development. Although I skipped some of the pages of musical analysis, which was beyond my own experience as an amateur, I found the book opened windows for new enjoyment of Barber’s works.
Fascinating details of Barbers private and public life, as they relate to his musical works at various stages of his own development. Although I skipped some of the pages of musical analysis, which was beyond my own experience as an amateur, I found the book opened windows for new enjoyment of Barber’s works.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews