Richard Wagner and the Centrality of Love

Barry Emslie's new study of Wagner's intellectual and creative wellsprings goes to the heart of the matter. Focusing on the centrality of love to the Wagnerian project, he shows how its obverse, hate - and specifically racial hate - is also ineluctably integral to the composer's Weltanschauung. Here, Barry Emslie outlines the central theme of this provocative new title:

Oh no, not another one! For while the world needs many things and no doubt many books, it surely doesn't need another book on Wagner. Well I have no option but to maintain that it does, or, at the very least, that it needs mine. This is an outrageously arrogant position but it is rather forced on the writer. All that work, all that time, if it ends up as a printed and published object pushed – oh so modestly pushed – under the noses of the public, just doesn't wash if the modesty is real. Surely this a discrepancy that Wagner forces on the author. For it is his dubious spirit that keeps the publications glut at just slightly below the tsunami but well above the justifiably sensible level. The ironic result is that the scribbler, no matter how self-effacing, is compelled into a form of special pleading which, in its own way, is no less egotistical than the megalomaniac posturings of the Master himself.

Richard Wagner and the Centrality of Love had its origins – as far as one can be specific on the matter – in an article I wrote for the Wagner Journal (Wagner: Race, Nation, Culture Vol. 2 No. 1). This paid as much attention to Wagner's polemical writings as it did to his music dramas, though it had little to say on more general German historical and cultural themes. It led to the book in two ways. Firstly there seemed in retrospect to be a bad fit between content and form. I felt that I had tried to pour a quart bottle into a pint jug. Much that was there needed to be filled-out, developed and placed in a more ambitious and far-reaching context. But the second consideration was yet more important. In reading Wagner's anti-semitic and Germanophile writings I became convinced that the natural and customary horror they evoked was misplaced, or, better said, that it was the product of a mis-recognition of what was really motivating him. For his anti-semitism is not significant simply because – or even chiefly because – it is obnoxious. Of much greater importance is that the idea of the Jews and Jewishness underpins his wider Weltanschauung. Consequently his positive notions of race, nation and culture take meaning from a Jewish antipode, chiefly because that antipode is dependent on a notion of “lovelessness”. I was convinced that this alternative, negative paradigm was essential to the productive development of Wagner's theoretical essays and his operatic practice, and that in its own way it was a key factor in the development of his ideas on redemption, on sexual liberation, and on what it means to belong to the German Volk. Far from muddying the waters it seduced me further into believing that I could interrelate the whole panoply of Wagner's intellectual and artistic strivings. In short it made the proposed book yet more ambitious: it was now going to cover a great deal of messy terrain without getting bogged down or entangled in contradictions. And it was all going to be done unproblematically under the rubric of love. Chance would be a fine thing!

Nonetheless, the element of hubris has remained. For while I would not claim that the book is the riddle of Wagner solved and that it – as used to be said of Marxism – knows itself to be the solution, it is not coy in laying out its far-reaching and comprehensive interpretation. Even so, everyone is aware that all pretension as to final answers in matters of this sort is folly. Worse than folly; it is unproductive. So there must be a contradiction at work here as well, in that one takes a big approach while accepting that no comprehensive interpretation can ever deliver in the manner that one wants. In the end even a grand theory purporting to get a handle on Wagner's music dramas, his polemical essays and to deal with them both in the impossibly broader contexts of German culture and history, can only vindicate itself in as much as it suggests new resolutions and opens up new areas of doubt and debate.

Which rather means that Richard Wagner and the Centrality of Love won't be, can't be, and certainly shouldn't be, the last word. Therefore one contributes to the potential tsunami in two ways. Firstly as drop in the ocean, and secondly, as an incitement to others. As Thomas Mann said “Wagner and no end...” At least not yet, anyway.

Richard Wagner and the Centrality of Love is published by the Boydell Press and available from your favourite music bookseller.

Artist Unknown

A friend tells me that she’s just bought the Beethoven piano trios on CD, so naturally I ask, ‘Who’s playing them?’ ‘Oh!’ she says. ‘No idea. I’m afraid I didn’t look at the names of the players.’ Why do people seem to think the performer is irrelevant?

A relative of mine recently confessed that although he was becoming quite familiar with the classics of the piano trio repertoire, he doubted whether he would be ever able to discern any difference between performances of those works by different groups. When I express dismay, he says, ‘But surely there can’t be much difference between top-level musicians playing the same works. Aren’t you all aiming at the same result?’ By that I suppose he meant that all musicians are trying to arrive at a perfect realisation of that holy text, the musical score. But there’s another way of looking at it, one expressed beautifully by musicologist Christopher Small when he pointed out that one might as well turn this perception on its head and consider that it’s the job of composers to give musicians something to play. At the end of the day, you can’t hear music unless it is played, and it is the character of the playing which most impacts on listeners at the moment of performance. Personally, I wouldn’t put the performance above the score in order of importance, but I do think the performance is crucial. Well, I would think so, wouldn’t I? But as well as knowing that a good piece can be ruined by a bad performance, and that a bad piece can be greatly enhanced by a good performance, I also truly believe that a great performance can bring a good piece to a new level.

I remember hearing Italian soprano Cecilia Bartoli in a programme of rather trivial Italian arias of the baroque and classical periods. Any thought of the music’s triviality was however completely driven away by the energy and commitment she gave to it, performing it as though she thought it was utterly fascinating. I remember thinking that it was an object lesson in how to perform second-rate music, and in fact I’ve learned from her example.

But even music of the finest quality can reveal new aspects of itself and even become transcendent in a fabulous performance. My husband Bob still remembers his awe on hearing Carlos Kleiber conduct Verdi’s Otello at Covent Garden in the 1970s. It’s an opera he’d previously heard in fine performances with other singers and other conductors. However, in Kleiber’s hands the opera suddenly struck him as a miracle of expressive coherence in a wholly unexpected way. Even though he knew the music very well, he was so gripped by the performance that he remained glued to his seat long after the performance had ended, unwilling to break the atmosphere. Later on, he heard that Bernard Haitink had attended the same performance with a fellow conductor and had said to his companion, ‘Well, that was the finest evening in the opera house that you or I will ever experience.’ Yet what remained for Bob was not the sensation of Kleiber’s personality but the conviction that Verdi’s Otello was even better than he had realised. When he could bear to listen to it again, performed by other people in later years, the effect was not the same. He realised that the alchemy at Covent Garden had been created by music brought to boiling point by particular musicians.

Of course, this kind of experience is not confined to music. How many schoolchildren, bored and irritated by having to study Shakespeare, conclude that there’s nothing in it for them until one day they get the opportunity to see a really good performance of one of his plays, when all of a sudden a door is kicked open in their minds.

This is an extract from Out of Silence by Susan Tomes, scheduled for publication later this month. It is a diary of a year in her life as a performer. Taking as its inspiration Schumann's remark that ‘I am affected by everything that goes on in the world, and I think it all over in my own way’, it aims to show how a working musician mulls over and draws energy from the events of everyday life.

Janáček, the Old Avant-Gardist

Leos Janáček is increasingly recognised as one of the major operatic masters of the early twentieth century. In an intriguing new book, Derek Katz challenges prevailing views of the composer’s relationship to Slavic culture and demonstrates that the operas are deeply indebted to various existing traditions. The first chapter , ‘Finding a Context’, looks at Janáček’s work from a number of viewpoints, including the one in this short extract:

One of the final chapters of Miloš Štědroň’s 1998 study Leoš Janáček and Music of the 20th Century is entitled “Young Conservative—to Old Avant-Gardist?!?” Despite the intriguing punctuation, at the end of this chapter Štědroň did indeed conclude that Janáček grew into an avant-gardist and declared that Janáček’s music of the 1920s is one of the most radical manifestations of European music from the first three decades of the century. This view of Janáček’s career as culminating in an avant-garde, or modernist, period is a widespread formulation with a long history. In a 1983 essay, Milan Kundera wrote of Janáček, “A solitary conservative figure in his youth, he has become an innovator in his old age.” Kundera described Janáček’s late works as “audacious” and suggested that he must be heard in the company of composers thirty and forty years younger, like Bartók, Stravinsky, Hindemith, Krenek, and Schoenberg. Similarly, the opening narration of Jaromil Jireš’s 1986 documentary film about Janáček declared that “Leoš Janáček was born deep in the mid-nineteenth century. His music belongs wholly to the avant-garde of the twentieth century. Although he was thirty years older than Bartók or Stravinsky . . . Janáček’s works rank amongst the most progressive of modern European music.”

In particular, the idea that Janáček was somehow generationally displaced can be traced back to the composer’s lifetime. In an enthusiastic 1925 essay, Erwin Schulhoff, almost exactly forty years younger than Janáček, wrote that as “astounding as it may seem, the septuagenarian Janáček belongs to the latest generation of composers, whose struggle he has also fought.” Hanns Eisler also noted Janáček’s late fecundity, remarking after a 1927 performance of the Sinfonietta that Janáček was “entirely unique amongst current bourgeois composers” and “still astoundingly full of creative strength as an old man.” In September 1926, Janáček travelled to Venice to hear a performance of his first string quartet at the annual International Society for Contemporary Music festival. Other living composers whose works were performed at the festival included Roussel, Vaughan Williams, Schoenberg, Ravel, Malipiero, Szymanowski, Stravinsky, Ladislav Vycpálek, Louis Gruenberg, Ibert, Honegger, and Hindemith. These twelve composers, although a heterogeneous group in most ways, shared at least one trait: all were younger than Janáček. In fact, most were significantly younger, with only Roussel and Vaughan Williams within twenty years of his age. Put another way, their average age was forty-four in 1926, while Janáček had turned seventy-two in July of that year.

Another, rather more idiosyncratic, tribute came from Henry Cowell, who visited Brno and lectured at the Club of Moravian Composers in 1926. Apparently the meeting with Janáček was a success, for in August 1927 Cowell invited Janáček to be an honorary member of The New Music Society of California. The letter of invitation, although addressed to “Mr. Janarchek,” does describe him as “without doubt one of the very greatest of living composers, without reservations.” Cowell had already collected Bartók, Bliss, Malipiero, Hába, Krenek, Schnabel, Berg, Casella, and Milhaud as honorary members; all were at least a quarter-century Janáček’s juniors.

The image of Janáček as an aged modernist has become firmly entrenched in standard music history texts. John Tyrrell’s entry for Janácek in The New Grove Turn of the Century Masters, for instance, asserts that Janácek’s late works belong “in sound and spirit with the music of the younger generation around him.” Similar judgments can be found in many standard surveys. Jim Samson, in The Late Romantic Era, describes Janáček’s musical style as “a radical new language” and “strikingly original,” while Donald Jay Grout calls Janáček “individual” and “exceptional” in his A Short History of Opera. More recently, Richard Taruskin titled his section on Janáček in The Oxford History of Western Music “The Oldest Twentieth-Century Composer” and points out that “his music is more often (and more tellingly) compared with that of Debussy, Stravinsky, or Bartók” than with that of Mahler or Richard Strauss.

Janáček Beyond the Borders by Derek Katz is published by the University of Rochester Press and available from your local music specialist bookseller.

On the trail of Samuel Barber

As we approach the centenary of Samuel Barber’s birth and the publication of Peter Dickinson’s Samuel Barber Remembered: A Centenary Tribute we are pleased to post the following account of Dickinson’s meetings with Barber’s friends and colleagues. The interviews, versions of which form the core of this new book, took place in 1981 for a BBC documentary on the composer.

For some years I had been hoping that Samuel Barber would be able to visit Keele University, where I had started the Music Department and its Centre for American Music programme in 1974. Copland and Carter had already been; I had met Cage and Thomson in London; but Barber proved more elusive. Finally I learnt that he was too ill to travel and we had to be content with honouring him at the University with a performance of the Violin Concerto and two performances of the Piano Sonata.

Barber has always been low in personal profile compared with Copland, but his music is just as regularly played throughout the world. I was curious about the success of a composer who hardly seemed American at all, had very little obvious originality in his work, and was often regarded as old-fashioned. So when the BBC invited me to put together a Radio 3 documentary with Arthur Johnson as producer, I looked forward to going on the trail of Samuel Barber. The series of interviews we were given forms the basis of my book Samuel Barber Remembered: A Centenary Tribute.

To start with, Barber was fortunate all his life. His father was a respected doctor in West Chester, Pennsylvania; his aunt Louise Homer was an internationally known opera singer; and her husband Sydney Homer was an accomplished composer of songs and an influential adviser to Barber at all stages. The family lived near enough to Philadelphia for him to become one of the first students at the new Curtis Institute, founded and liberally endowed by Mary Louise Curtis Bok in 1924.

At the age of nine Barber wrote a note to his mother warning her that he was meant to be a composer and not an athlete. At Curtis, though, he was a triple major – in composition, piano and voice. He was always a good pianist and has recorded his Hermit Songs with Leontyne Price. As a singer, he recorded Dover Beach in 1935 and did some professional singing. However, as a result of prizes, awards, friends and family, he was able to concentrate on composing.

It was at Curtis that Barber met Gian Carlo Menotti. Eighteen himself, he was asked to look after the gifted seventeen-year-old from Italy who couldn’t speak English. Menotti has described the beginning of a friendship that lasted over forty years:

'Sam was the very first friend I made in America. I had learnt that he was the idol of the Curtis Institute. He too studied composition with Scalero, but also piano with Isabelle Vengerova and voice with Emilio de Gogorza. He was considered a genius in all three courses. Not only was Sam enormously gifted, but he was very handsome and very intelligent.'

Obviously Menotti was going to be an essential source in every way so Arthur Johnson and I arranged to visit him at his country estate Yester House, some thirty miles outside Edinburgh. Menotti was as charming as ever and, even though he was surrounded by French TV making a film for his seventieth birthday, he gave us about two hours, all preserved on tape. It soon became obvious how much Menotti and Barber had in common. Both came into contact early on with strong musical traditions and, unlike many an enfant terrible of twentieth-century music, they accepted them as they found them. In both careers they achieved popular appeal but, as time went on, some critical disdain came their way. All the same, both could afford, in the words of Liberace, to “cry all the way to the bank.”

After visiting Menotti, our interviews were based in New York – a mixture of composer colleagues, performers, friends, publishers and critics. Composers of very different temperaments from Barber, such as Copland, Schuman and Thomson, found much to admire in his work, and performers with whom he had worked closely were devoted to him.

It was May, which I remembered as fairly warm in New York, but for two days it rained constantly. On one of those wet days we visited Copland at his house, Rock Hill, Peekskill, New York (now Copland House, the centre for American creative arts) situated in dense woodland an hour by train from New York City. Copland recalled the inter-war years as times when he was a modernist getting all the brickbats, but Sam Barber was a conservative. Time has ironed all that out and the difference doesn’t matter. Virgil Thomson, at the age of eighty-five, was less easy to communicate with than Copland because of his deafness. Most of the interview involved shouting but his mind was as acute as ever. He characterized Barber as a composer for “high middle-brow taste”, like Rachmaninov, and began by talking about money. Charles Turner told us that Thomson had a habit of going up to Barber at parties and saying: “You’re the most successful composer alive!” Barber, with a retiring, melancholic and rather private nature did not always enjoy this.

Another composer we met was William Schuman, whose centenary also falls in 2010, who wrote much of his music whilst holding down important jobs including the Presidency of the Juilliard School of Music and then of the Lincoln Center. I asked Schuman what Barber’s style consisted of. He admitted that he once heard the Cello Concerto on the car radio without realizing it was by Barber and insisted this was not important and would not have mattered in previous centuries. The main thing is that the music is “perfectly made” – like Brahms.

This brought us to discuss the appeal of the Adagio for Strings, the one work everybody – dead or alive – knows by Barber. Dead, because it has been widely used as a funeral elegy ever since the death of President Roosevelt in 1945. Even Leontyne Price, who didn’t know about this, said she wanted it played at her own funeral. The universality of the emotions conveyed in the work is incontestable. Exactly what those emotions are is impossible to pin down. Virgil Thomson, provocative as ever, alleged the piece was a “detailed love-scene.”

Barber wrote for some of the greatest performers of the period. Unfortunately Horowitz, who had a crucial role in the Piano Sonata, was not well enough to see us but we met John Browning, for whom Barber wrote his Piano Concerto in 1962.

He stressed that Barber wrote for the public, much as a performer plays to the audience and aims to communicate. He mentioned some ways in which Barber would take account of the performer when a new piece was still rough. For example, the end of the first movement of the Piano Concerto became loud, not soft, at Browning’s instigation.

We met Leontyne Price, one of the finest singers of her generation, at her apartment in Greenwich Village. Barber wrote his Hermit Songs for her and they gave the premiere together. She sang Cleopatra in Barber’s second grand opera, Antony and Cleopatra, commissioned for the opening of the new Met at Lincoln Center in 1966. In her interview she confirms, with plenty of amusing detail, that the occasion was wrong for Barber’s music – and so was Zefirelli’s production. Although there were palpable mishaps and the work got savaged by the critics, Price insisted that she had never been in a flop in her life and she and Barber were very moved by the revised version put on by the Juilliard School in 1974.

Other people we interviewed make it possible to explore the sources of Barber’s music, the nature of its appeal and its historical position. The historian H. Wiley Hitchcock finds Barber a safe, careful composer working within limits, and very lucky in his opportunities. Barber himself agreed about his luck - “I was very lucky always.” Others compared Barber to Bach in writing old-fashioned music of high quality. A comparison with Benjamin Britten is sometimes made but it looks as if they never met. There is some common ground between Barber and William Walton. Both were strongly attracted to Italy and the music of both continues to reach an audience.

Barber never courted publicity, so he gave very few interviews. There are three in this book and the one with Allan Kozinn dates from the last year of Barber’s life. He asked Barber why he had not responded to the various currents of modern music and Barber replied:

'Ah, I was waiting for this. Why haven’t I changed? Why should I? There’s no reason music should be difficult for the audience to understand is there? Not that I necessarily address the audience when I compose, or for that matter, the players. Or posterity. I write for the present and I write for myself. I think that most music that is really good will be appreciated by the audience ultimately.'

Peter Dickinson’s Samuel Barber Remembered: A Centenary Tribute will be published in March. Two CDs of Dickinson's own works have recently been issued by Naxos. Coming next, the late John Browning on the piano concerto and working with Barber.

Inner Voices

Some years ago we published an account of life on the road with a chamber music ensemble: Beyond the Notes. Pianist Susan Tomes’ diary of her time with Domus and the beginnings of the Florestan Trio captured the imagination of music lovers and critics alike, and remains essential reading for young musicians taking their first steps in the classical music business. Next month the Boydell Press will publish a new book by the same author, Out of Silence. Taking as its inspiration Schumann's remark that 'I am affected by everything that goes on in the world, and I think it all over in my own way', it aims to show how a working musician mulls over and draws energy from the events of everyday life.

Over the coming weeks we’ll be posting some short extracts from Out of Silence, beginning with this piece about inner voices in music, specifically in chamber music:

After many years of being an amateur wind player, my brother-in-law has given up the French horn and has taken up the viola instead. He feels that playing the horn is getting too strenuous for his lips. I asked him whether he didn’t feel this was his opportunity to grab the limelight and take up the violin instead, to have the experience of playing the top line? Or the double bass, to see what it’s like at the bottom? He says that having played the French horn for years in wind quintets and orchestras, he finds he has become attached to the role of being a middle voice, and wants to continue in this persona, so he is naturally drawn to the viola. Just as he sees the horn as the mediator of the brass section, he sees the viola as the voice of reason in the strings, rarely getting to sing a glamorous aria, but playing a very important stabilising role. He identifies with this role. We agree that an interest in inner voices is one which marks out a certain kind of musician. There’s often so much focus on the leading voice, the top line, the melody instrument, the solo part, and so on, but just as much if not more meaning emanates from the middle voices, often not sufficiently heard or understood. Thank goodness there are people who feel genuinely drawn to playing those middle parts, who see themselves as the binding agent, like eggs in a cake mixture.

There’s something in common with the chamber musician here, though a love of inner voices doesn’t quite sum up the chamber musician’s passion. For us, it’s a little more complicated than that. Chamber players love the diversity of roles they have to play, sometimes being the leader, sometimes a companion, sometimes a supporter or a commentator. They love to find out when they are meant to surge forward, when to step into the limelight, when to comment from the wings, when to contradict, and when to offer another, perhaps more persuasive point of view. They understand that it is a process of layering, and that they must be prepared to explore all the layers. I don’t know whether such people are drawn to chamber music because they are open-minded and naturally good listeners, or whether they acquire a tolerant approach along the way, but one thing’s for sure: you won’t get much out of chamber music unless you genuinely have a live-and-let-live attitude. If you’re convinced your own part is the most important all the time, you’d be better off sticking to solo concertos. In chamber music, even the naturally more dominant instruments, such as the piano (or should I say, even the naturally more dominant instrumentalists, like pianists) still have to weave their way in and out of the plot. Chamber music at its best is a vision of the ideal society, where people converse, exchange and are sensitive to one another, respecting one another’s territories. It seems to me good preparation for life in a free society.

Out of Silence by Susan Tomes will be published by the Boydell Press next month.

Our 100th Post: Going behind their backs

Born out of papers presented at a study day in April 2008, Benjamin Britten: New Perspectives on his Life and Work is a fascinating volume. Edited by Lucy Walker, it represents the most recent work in Britten scholarship, covering such areas as musical and non-musical influences on the composer (as varied as Ovid, the cinema and Shostakovich), studies of individual works, and a discussion of a work that was never written – the un-set libretto by Australian novelist, Patrick White.

In the following short extract from a much longer essay, composer Colin Matthews looks at the fraught question of publishing and recording unfinished and unpublished works. It is a subject on which he is unusually qualified to speak: for many years he collaborated with Deryck Cooke on the performing version of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony. In addition, he has been much involved with editing Britten's unpublished music, including the recent reconstruction of a clarinet concerto and three songs for Les Illuminations which were omitted from the published version.

We would urge anyone interested in this subject to read his essay in its entirety, as we can only give a flavour of the argument here:


The most significant unfinished piece to have fully entered the repertoire is, of course, Mozart’s Requiem. There can be very few, if any, who would maintain that it should not be performed at all, as not representative of Mozart’s final wishes, but of course there has been controversy for over 200 years about Süssmayr’s contribution as regards both its extent and its competence; and as scholarship has become more focused, different versions have emerged, although none has completely won the day and supplanted the standard editions.

Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony is a different case, since it seems just as likely that Schubert was content with it in its incomplete state as that he tried but failed to complete it. Like the Mozart Requiem, it has been a repertoire piece from the outset, as has the torso of Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony; but here we have a different and tragic state of affairs. It is almost certain that Bruckner not only finished the Finale in sketch form, but completed a much larger proportion than survives in orchestral score. The chaotic dispersal of the manuscript after his death, with his friends appropriating pages of the Finale as souvenirs, means that – unless those missing pages turn up (which is not impossible even now) – the Finale cannot be reconstructed other than hypothetically.

As we move nearer to our own time – with the unlikelihood of discovering, say, a previously unknown Strauss symphonic poem – attention turns to juvenilia or to earlier versions of well-known works. Here the record industry, in its insatiable quest for novelty (as long as this does not mean recording genuinely new music) has been responsible for unearthing works that might be better forgotten.

The Thematic Catalogue of Britten’s music will comprise a completely open and unexpurgated account of everything he wrote. There will in future be no excuse for the kind of misinformation where, for instance, works are regularly described as having been ‘discovered’ at the Britten–Pears Foundation, as though they had been previously unknown or unrecognized. In fact the basic listing of works, including juvenilia and unfinished pieces, was made while Britten was still alive, and at his instigation. Myth and misinformation tends to become attached to ‘unknown’ works, and especially to the music that I have been discussing – Mozart’s Requiem most notably, of course, but at the first performance of the three completed movements of Bruckner’s Ninth, seven years after his death, the existence of even the sketches for the Finale was deliberately denied. Those musicologists who examined Mahler’s Tenth largely failed to grasp the scope of the work, or its scale; there are still some today who wish it had remained in manuscript and unplayed. No one, before Anthony Payne, thought to look properly through Elgar’s sketches; and the announcement of the reconstructed Third Symphony’s first performance in 1997 brought forth howls of protest from devoted Elgarians who would have preferred that Elgar’s wish that the manuscript should be burned – expressed once only and immediately contradicted – had been carried out.

Would Britten have approved of works that he had put to one side being revealed for all to see? Probably not. But would anyone argue, given the archive that we have charge of, that we should not make it as accessible as we can? This does not mean publishing or recording everything – far from it – but so long as this ‘unauthorized’ music is given its proper perspective, it can only add to our overall understanding of the composer. I have to admit myself to a particular fascination with the hidden workings of composers, and have learned far more from pursuing this path than from analysis, whose insights by comparison can sometimes seem a little cold and clinical – something Britten himself is known to have felt. He would have been somewhat dismayed at the idea of a study day being devoted to him, especially one which brought so much attention to the juvenilia – ‘here was no Mozart I fear’, he wrote, in typically disparaging tone, in the introduction to a collection of his early piano pieces – but I cannot help feeling that he would also have been secretly pleased.


The essay from which this post is taken may be found in Benjamin Britten: New Perspectives on his Life and Work edited by Lucy Walker and published by the Boydell Press in the Aldeburgh Studies series. Unknown Britten, Colin Matthews’ reconstructions of rediscovered works by Britten is available on CD and download from the NMC online shop. While there, take a look at some of their other inventive releases including their Gramophone award-winning NMC Songbook.

Avoiding ‘triteness and false brilliance’

2010 marks the centenary of the birth of Samuel Barber. At the age of nine he told his mother ‘I was not meant to be an athlete – I was meant to be a composer.’ Apart from a dip in popularity in the turbulent 1960s, his music has always enjoyed widespread popularity: his Adagio for Strings appears in television documentaries, films and near the top of radio stations’ lists of ‘all time favourites of classical music’.

To commemorate the centenary, the University of Rochester Press will publish Peter Dickinson’s Samuel Barber Remembered featuring interviews with Barber's friends, fellow composers, and performers, notably Gian Carlo Menotti, Aaron Copland, William Schuman, Virgil Thomson, soprano Leontyne Price, and pianist John Browning. Based on a BBC Radio 3 programme first broadcast in 1981, the book also includes three of the very few interviews extant with Barber himself.

We begin a series of extracts from this fascinating book with a short piece, looking at Barber’s early reception in England.

The prolific American writer David Ewen, writing for a British public in the Musical Times in 1939, found Roy Harris “the most significant” among American composers but continued: “Samuel Barber promises to become the most important discovery since Harris.” Ewen heard Barber’s First Symphony at the Salzburg Festival in 1937 where it was followed by an ovation. He went on prophetically in terms rarely used by any British writer then or later: “Samuel Barber’s facility in self-expression, his extraordinary gift in formulating his copious ideas into a coherent and integrated pattern . . . his capacity for writing a line of melody, and his instinct for harmony and orchestration bespeak a formidable creative talent. . . . Samuel Barber is already a fine and original composer: there is every reason to believe he may ultimately develop into a great one.”

Harris has not stood the test of time, but the adulation accorded to Barber in America came early and was sustained, apart from a reaction that became perceptible in the 1960s. By looking at Barber’s exposure in London, we see how his music gradually made its way in a major cultural capital outside the United States without the assumptions of genius common on its home ground.

The first hearing of his music in London was with a group of young musicians from the Curtis Institute, including the Curtis Quartet, sponsored by the Philadelphia branch of the English-Speaking Union in June 1935. They gave three concerts of American music, the first at Lady Astor’s house in St. James’s Square that included the Serenade, op. 1, for string quartet, Dover Beach, and four other songs. Barber told his parents: “Lady Astor went behind the scenes during the concert and complimented my music by asking if I was dead yet!” The next time Barber’s music was heard in London seems to have been when the Curtis Quartet played the Serenade at the Aeolian Hall on November 25, 1936. The Times merely referred to “a rhapsodical serenade by Samuel Barber and . . . Turina’s La Oracion del torero—neither of them a work of great moment.”

More significant was the British premiere of the String Quartet given by the Curtis Quartet at the Aeolian Hall in November. As The Times reported: “It has a fine slow movement, a meditation that unfolds itself in spirals. Most composers find it easier to write quick movements than slow but Mr. Barber achieves a greater success with the more difficult task.” Indeed he did.

In June 1938 the festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music was held in London. Copland was represented by El Salon Mexico. There was nothing by Barber in the official program—there never would be—but Boosey and Hawkes put on a recital in its studio that included Dover Beach sung by Victor Harding with the Cardiff Ensemble. According to The Times, “This was not modern in the sense that the other works (Lennox Berkeley and Alan Bush) were, for it matched the nineteenth-century words very happily, but it did not sound outmoded and rang true.” As it happens, Vaughan Williams lectured at Bryn Mawr College in 1932, met Barber, and heard him sing Dover Beach to his own accompaniment. According to Barber, Vaughan Williams congratulated him and said: “I tried several times to set Dover Beach but you really got it!”

Barber’s First Essay was given at the Proms on August 24, 1939. The Times reported: “This short and simple piece is well constructed from not very appealing material. . . [T]hough it does not suggest a composer of outstanding originality, it avoids triteness and false brilliance. The points are well made by a practised hand.”

By 1945 the Toscanini recording of the Adagio for Strings had come out, and Gramophone declared: “Barber has an eloquence that I like: he lets himself go, and finds a richness of string speech that will be cordially enjoyed. It is shapely, well-knit music, conservative in idiom, expressive, dignified; music of a good brain that . . . also makes one believe in the composer’s heart.” The recording also impressed William McNaught: “This work has come to the front for good reason. . . . [I]t holds the attention by steady growth and plan: not many composers put such faith in sustained equable strength and reposeful movement. . . . [O]ne returns again and again to this griefless elegy to observe how much meaning can be patiently drawn from a slow, conjunct diatonic melody in contrast to the garrulous haste and bustling figures that are the fashion.”

The Adagio for Strings was in the Proms on 5 August 1945; it was also played by the New London Orchestra under Anatole Fistoulari at the Cambridge Theatre on September 16 and by the New London Orchestra under Alec Sherman on December 15, 1946. Now the Adagio was firmly established in England and would soon go further.

Peter Dickinson’s Samuel Barber Remembered: A Centenary Tribute will be published in March. Further excerpts will follow on this blog.