Good Monday morning, dear friend. Today, we will get an in-depth look into a wonderful classic that has been played in movies and TV shows but is more famous for being played at high-profile funerals, such as those of former President John F. Kennedy, Former President Roosevelt, and Princess Grace of Monaco. Enjoy the music and the reading... Adagio for Strings, Op. 11 No.2 (From "Platoon") “Adagio”? First of all, it wasn’t originally written as a stand-alone but as the second movement of Barber’s String Quartet Op. 11. While Barber never said much if anything regarding the inspiration for the piece, his lifelong partner Gian Carol Menotti (they met at the Curtis Institute when both were students there) said that Barber had encountered the following passage in Virgil’s Georgics: A breast-shaped curve of wave begins to whiten And rise above the surface, then rolling on Gathers and gathers until it reaches land Huge as a mountain and crashes among the rocks With a prodigious roar, and what was deep Comes churning up from the bottom in mighty swirls. The year was 1936. Menotti and Barber were living in Austria at the time; Hitler had come to power three years earlier. The wave was beginning to whiten, as it were. But this Barber work might never have come to be so popular had it not been for Arturo Toscanini, the great Italian conductor. He heard some of Barber’s work and asked him to write a couple of short pieces for performance by the NBC Symphony, which Toscanini had begun directing after moving to the US from Italy in the wake of Mussolini’s rise to power. So Barber re-worked the second movement of the quartet into an orchestral version and sent it and another short piece off to the temperamental Italian in January 1938. Shortly afterward Toscanini returned both manuscripts to Barber without comment. Barber was miffed, figuring that Toscanini didn’t like the music. But no! Toscanini had memorized both the pieces and so didn’t need the written music any longer. (I’m a little puzzled by this story, aren’t you? The orchestra needed the music! It’s reported that Toscanini didn’t look at the music again until the day of the performance, but there has to be more to the story than that. I’ve consulted numerous sources and they all just repeat this same version. Did Toscanini get the parts copied before he sent it back to Barber? I think that he must have done so. But no one will tell me for sure, so there it is.) The piece was broadcast as part of a concert in November 1938 and just took off. It first began to be associated with death and funerals when it was played on the radio at the announcement of FDR’s death in 1945, leading to a long string of famous people whose deaths were associated with it, including John F. Kennedy, Albert Einstein, Princess Grace, and Princess Diana. It popped up in films, Platoon 1986, was re-arranged in many different styles and even appeared in The Simpsons and South Park. (Sigh.) But, as I said at the outset, Barber kept writing music. He was, after all, only 28 at the time of the “Adagio” premiere. His later life was pretty unhappy, as he was devastated by the poor reception of his opera Antony and Cleopatra in 1966. We are told that “Barber never quite got over it, and for the rest of his life he virtually lost his will to compose. . . . ‘What I wrote and what I envisioned had nothing to do with what one saw on that stage,’ Barber later told the writer John Gruen.” He sank into depression and alcoholism, living in isolation for much of the time. Despite all this unhappiness, though, he did manage to produce at least some additional music. I’d like to find out more about all this, as the sources I found don’t seem to agree. It’s very hard to boil someone’s life down into a short article! Well, whatever the merits or demerits of Barber’s other works, it seems clear that the “Adagio” has an innate quality that gave it such prominence. Sure, it got off to a great start because of the Toscanini broadcast, and many artistic endeavors deserve the same publicity but never get it. Mediocrity usually drops from sight, though, eventually. Barber did lament the fact that his other words never gained much popularity, but one can’t feel too bad for him. (Source comes from How Did Samuel Barber's "Adagio for Strings" Become So Popular?) Have a blessed day... Take care and GOD bless...
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