| Contents |
Samuel Barber and his family -- A musical education -- Personal matters: early years -- Other formative experiences -- Early works through 1932 -- More adventures at home and abroad, 1933-1939 -- Music for a Scene from Shelley and One day of spring -- Songs and choruses, 1934-1940 -- The First symphony and the String quartet -- The Adagio for strings and the First essay -- The Violin concerto and the Second essay -- Wartime service -- The Second symphony and Excursions -- The Capricorn concerto, Horizon, and the Cello concerto -- Barber and his contemporaries -- Medea -- Knoxville: summer of 1915 and "Nuvoletta" -- The Piano sonata and Mélodies passagères -- Personal matters: later years -- A composer's life -- Souvenirs and the Hermit songs -- Prayers of Kierkegaard, Adventure, and Summer music -- Vanessa -- From the Nocturne to Die natali -- The Piano concerto and Andromache's farewell -- The creation of Antony and Cleopatra -- Antony and Cleopatra in performance -- From the Chorale for Ascension Day to The lovers -- From Fadograph of a Yestern scene to the Canzonetta. |
| Abstract |
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 figures like Serge Koussevitzky and Marian Anderson. Barber's works have since became standard in concert repertoire and continue to flourish across high art and popular culture. The author (George Gershwin, Aaron Copland) offers a multifaceted account of Barber's life and music while placing the artist in his social and cultural milieu. Born into a musical extended family, Barber pursued his ambitions from childhood. The author follows Barber's path from his precocious youth and training through a career where, from the start, the composer consistently received prizes, fellowships, and other recognition. Stylistic analyses of works like Adagio for Strings, the Second Symphony, the opera Vanessa, and Piano Concerto No. 1 stand alongside revealing accounts of the music's commissioning, performance, reception, and legacy. Throughout, he weaves in accounts of Barber's encounters with musical contemporaries like Leonard Bernstein and Dmitri Mitropoulos, performers from Eleanor Steber and Leontyne Price to Vladimir Horowitz, patrons, admirers, and a wide circle of friends and acquaintances in and out of the arts. He also provides an eloquent portrait of the composer's decades-long relationship with, and break from, Gian Carlo Menotti. Informed by new interviews and immense archival research, this book is the long-awaited critical and personal biography of a monumental figure in twentieth-century American music. |
