Samuel Barber

His Life and Legacy

Howard Pollack

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2023
• ISBN:
  9780252054051
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

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, Knoxville: 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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Samuel Barber and His Family
• 2. A Musical Education
• 3. Personal Matters: Early Years
• 4. Other Formative Experiences
• 5. Early Works through 1932
• 6. More Adventures at Home and Abroad, 1933–1939
• 7. Music for a Scene from Shelley and One Day of Spring
• 8. Songs and Choruses, 1934–1940
• 9. The First Symphony and the String Quartet
• 10. The Adagio for Strings and the First Essay
• 11. The Violin Concerto and the Second Essay
• 12. Wartime Service
• 13. The Second Symphony and Excursions
• 14. The Capricorn Concerto, Horizon, and the Cello Concerto
• 15. Barber and His Contemporaries
• 16. Medea
• 17. Knoxville: Summer of 1915 and “Nuvoletta”
• 18. The Piano Sonata and Mélodies passagères
• 19. Personal Matters: Later Years
• 20. A Composer’s Life
• 21. Souvenirs and the Hermit Songs
• 22. Prayers of Kierkegaard, Adventure, and Summer Music
• 23. Vanessa
• 24. From the Nocturne to Die Natali
• 25. The Piano Concerto and Andromache’s Farewell
• 26. The Creation of Antony and Cleopatra
• 27. Antony and Cleopatra in Performance
• 28. From the Chorale for Ascension Day to The Lovers
• 29. From Fadograph of a Yestern Scene to the Canzonetta
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index