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The history of the arts is filled with
examples of those who expanded the means

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of expression. There have, however, been
other artists who were content to create

within established means. In music, for
example, such composers would include Bach,

Mozart, Mendelssohn and Brahms.
Samuel Barber is in this tradition.

Barber's work is widely recognized and
accepted as having enriched the literature

of virtually every facet of musical
expression. Each piece that he has created

is characterized by deeply felt emotions
couched in the sophisticated terms of a

master craftsman. If one were to choose a
single word best to describe his art, the

choice would have to be "impeccable."
It's not my point to rate composers;

I can't imagine 20th century American
music without Samuel Barber. I don't

think you can talk about the heighth of
creative ability in this country without

referencing Samuel Barber. To me, he's
just one of those orienting composers:

if you're going to study American music,
you're going to study

Samuel Barber and his music.

"There is so much to music;
it is building up an influence which

no one can measure. To me, all great music
is a protest, a revolution against all the

artificiality which surrounds it. When
greatness bursts its fetters, then the

world sees something; it may look like
a cataclysm, but it may be a destruction

of hypocrisy which binds creativeness
and stifles the honest voice."

Music is meant to convey emotion. It can
be happy, it can be sarcastic, it can be

melancholy; I'm not sure that most
composers set out to convey those

emotions when they put pen to paper.
I think what they're looking for is

contrast. Barber's works that are slow and
have moments of serene calm and repose

do so in a way that just touches the heart.
I loved the music of his that I knew.

I've always associated Sam's music with
Plato. In my mind, I think he is a

Platonic composer, in the sense that I
feel that all his music has been

written in terms of what Plato called the
absolutes, with a faith in the concept

that there is an absolute truth, and an
absolute beauty, and an absolute rightness

of things. And it seems
to me that all Sam's

music has tried to do
that; has tried to form

one version or another of absolute beauty.

Dover Beach is I think one of most

profoundly moving poems I've ever read.
The other aspect, of course, is Barber's

setting which would sound somewhat
musicological or clinical if you didn't

realize how young he was and how
passionate he was about the poem himself.

It belies what I would consider his
genius that he found such a profound

essence to the poem in very simple
motives, so that you have this

metaphor of the sea of time, and you have
this rocking, and unsettledness of water

to this archaic language, referencing
archaic mentality, that is as contemporary

as the day it was spoken way back when.
And then, starts again: we kind of come

out of the metaphor of water, and
really are in the consciousness of life

and love, and passion, respect; to that
great release, the highest note in the

whole piece, of love; and the scale down
with the first violins, and then back

into that drudgery and motion, as if we
never, ever as human beings quite get out

of the useless habits of hatred that
we have. I believe like so many that

Dover Beach is one of the most profound
statements in music that has come out

of American creativity.

Most people obviously think
of the Adagio for Strings

when they think of Samuel Barber.
When I think of him,

I think of Dover Beach. If you want to
know what melancholy in music sounds

like, it's that. Because that very great
setting of Matthew Arnold's poem for

baritone and string quartet is not just
a purely musical expression, but it's

text-driven. And it is the great text
of the late Victorian period, in which

Arnold sings, if you want to put it that
way, of the disintegration of faith, the

disintegration of certainty, the
withdrawal like a tide of the belief

that life has meaning and has order.
It's going away. And Barber, he didn't

just set that poem for fun. I think quite
clearly it was a personal expression for

him, so personal that he sang
it, that he made a record of it.

And small wonder that it should be so
tremendously powerful of a piece: I think one

of the greatest pieces of
vocal music of the 20th

century, maybe it's the
best thing he ever wrote.

I never met Samuel Barber.
I began my work in 1982 a year after he

died, just one month shy of his 71st
birthday. I embarked on this because I was

beginning a doctoral dissertation, and my
bottom line was: how come he wrote the

music that he wrote, the kind of music
that he wrote? What was it that

influenced him the most? Who and
what and how?

The poet Robert Horan
observed that almost

everywhere in Barber's
work is the sensitive and

penetrating design of melancholy, and
perhaps no other work more aptly

expresses this melancholy than Barber's
Dover Beach. One wonders what was going

on in this young man's mind as he was
selecting the poem and writing about it.

It was written at a time when he was
wrestling with self doubts. And what

undoubtedly appealed to him both musically
and emotionally were lines, for example,

"The sea of faith was once too at the full,
but now I only hear its melancholy, long

withdrawing roar." And yet, the optimism of
"a world so various, so beautiful, so new."

But then the pessimism of, "There is
neither joy, nor love, nor light, nor

certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain."
So, I really believe for him this did

represent a personal statement, and his
vulnerability as he stepped out of the

protective cocoon of childhood into
the adult world. He was, after all, 21.

I'm Christopher Rex; I'm principal
cellist of the Atlanta Symphony

Orchestra. I've been there for over 31
years, and I studied with Orlando Cole

at the Curtis Institute of Music for my
undergrad, and then graduate work in

Juilliard with Leonard Rose before
getting into the Philadelphia Orchestra

when Eugene Ormandy was there. Ormandy
was a fan of Barber, and so when I was

in the Philadelphia
Orchestra we did many

times work with Barber,
and he would come to

the performances, and he
seemed like he was a,

he had a businessman
aura around him, rather

than some kind of an artiste, you know, and
a little bit of a melancholy businessman

in a way; you know, he seemed
a little bit reserved.

It's always interesting to put a
composer's output in conjunction with

what he's going through in his life
at the time, and often it's just the

opposite of what you think. When you're
young, you can feel an intensity and

longing that's really
an imaginative one, and

rather than anything
you've ever experienced.

Even as little kids we really yearn
for certain things, and it should be

that kind of yearning in a nineteen-year-old
that he was able to put it down

into music. It's very powerful.

Orlando Cole was a fellow student whom
Barber respected highly, and "Landy" as he

was called, it was for him that he wrote
the Cello Sonata, and together they

essentially shaped it: not the music, but
the technical aspects that Barber

needed to know in order to make it work.
So he and Barber actually gave the

first performance with Barber at the piano
at Curtis. Barber considered this a student

work, and even in his later years he
wasn't terribly fond of the Cello Sonata

for that reason. And he didn't really
find what I consider his own voice

which combines the - and this is extremely
important in understanding his music - he

was not a "conservative" in the sense of,
you know, pulling back: he was more of a

conservator: that is, he used tradition
- he melded tradition - with

20th century modernism insofar as it
still was tonal, it still allowed for

melody and expressiveness. And that's
the key to his music, and why it

will last forever and ever and ever, and
even contemporary composers today, of

course - the young crop -
are writing tonal music.

The sense of needing to talk about rhythm
and melody, singing - you see, that's

where music started, really, right?

I'm Jordan Kuspa, and I'm a composer.
The Barber Cello Concerto was the first

piece of music that really got me
interested in 20th century music.

I was already composing music by this
point; I think I was about 13 years old.

But that was the first real
love affair that I had with any

20th century music.

I don't really know what it was about that
piece, but there's something that's just

absolutely haunting and gorgeous;
particularly the second movement, and I

never found the opportunity as a cellist to
play the Concerto, but there's something

of that same quality in the Cello Sonata,
which is a piece that I had the

opportunity to learn with Orlando Cole.
In 2002 when I was working with him,

Orlando Cole was 95 years old, but boy was
he sharp as a tack, and had very, very

precise ideas about how the
Sonata should be played.

I think that nowadays it's less what
style of music, what language, what

harmonic techniques you write, and
more the level of honesty that you're

transmitting. It's a such a difficult
thing to put your finger on, but I think

that people respond to a sort of
purity of an artistic statement.

It's a great time to be a composer
because we have the freedom to do what

we want. And in a way, the legacy
of Barber's music is that he was a

composer who essentially said, I will do
what I want, and I think that that takes

a certain kind of courage. Through his
entire body of work, there is nothing

that feels out of place or forced, and in
that sense, while he may have been

writing music that is identifiably
related to past modes of expression, in a

way he was his own kind of a maverick,
in that he was perfectly willing to go

it alone on this path.

The barber First Symphony has a curious
history, because the premiere was in

Italy, and you would have thought that
this young composer, this brash Barber,

would have caught on.

He seemed to convey a European sensibility
in his music, but by the time we'd

gotten to the mid-1940s and into the '50s,
Europeans expected a different kind of

writing from every composer: if you were
going to be American, you had to be more

jazz; if you weren't that, you had to be
following the lines of the emigres

who came to the United States, writing
like Stravinsky or Schoenberg;

Barber was having none of that. "When
you were studying in Italy, Mr. Barber,

was your music performed
there at all?"

"Yes, as a matter of fact, my First
Symphony was premiered in Rome by the

Augusteo Orchestra under Molinari."
"How did Italian audiences take to this

new music by an American composer?"
"Well, Italian audiences are not used to

hearing much new music, and they're not at
all shy about showing their feelings. After

the performance, I went
out on stage a couple

of times, and was
greeted by about 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, nuh uh,

better not: the hisses win."

So Barber didn't fit the European mode - it
was a frustration for him. I'm very

fortunate now because I do take
especially the First Symphony on the

road quite often. It's a remarkable piece;
it's 20 minutes long:

the structure is that of a four-movement
symphony, although Barber calls it

"Symphony in One Movement." What Barber
does is to take basically two different

thematic elements and juggle them over
the course of the four movements of the

piece. So the actual material on which
it's based is very concise; the

transformations he gives to the melodies
are remarkable, and it has a dramatic

impact: it tells this story - in the
20 minutes, he condenses the entire canon

symphonic history into a
remarkable piece of music.

My main concern, because I'm not a musicologist -
I'm a writer, and I love literature -

so what really interested me in Barber's
life was the novelistic quality of his life.

It's drama; there is this incredible
succession of success for almost 30

years. Most all of his works are
premiered by great musicians, orchestras,

the critics find them wonderful; and then
you have the big failure of Antony and

Cleopatra, and after that, those 15 years
where Barbara basically struggles to

recover his confidence, to recover his
inspiration; and that was the thing that

interested me most. And I was very moved
to see this old man trying to do what

was supposed to do the best: that he
is writing music despite and still.

I think from the very start - from his
very first big-scale symphonic work - he

achieved to write the music he really
wanted to write; and I think it's also

one of the reasons why you rarely find in
Barber's catalog several works of the

same genre. You have one
Piano Concerto, one Cello

Concerto, one Cello Sonata,
one String Quartet:

It's because he thinks that all
he wanted to say through this

particular measure: the
orchestra, the string

quartet, the sonata: he achieved
to do what he wanted in one work.

Barber was a masterful orchestrator. Some
composers just inherently understand the

orchestra, and that is
their instrument. The way

he combines instruments
for different colors -

It was clear also that he loved the
oboe; I don't know if he had a close

friend that was an oboe player, but
almost every major Barber work has a

beautiful oboe solo. He understood the
singing quality of the oboe like no

other composer did. But I think that
he is like, the only person I can

think of today is John Corigliano who
has that same facility with the

orchestra as an instrument. So it's a
great joy to conduct his music, because

you don't have to tinker with it too
much; you know, it's not a matter of

constantly trying to rebalance things
because the composer didn't really do

his job properly:
it's just the opposite.

I remember a particularly
happy day spent

in the company of Sam Barber; it was a
very special day for all of us Americans,

and that was the day of the great ships
that arrived in New York Harbor in 1976

around the July 4th weekend. I don't know
if that rings any bell, but you might think

back, and in newspapers around the world,
it showed this incredible sight of endless

amounts of tall-masted schooners and
warships and things from the 19th

century by the hundreds going up the
Hudson River - the mouth there, past

the Statue of Liberty and the Twin Towers
and all of that. And I do remember everyone

wanted to know what everyone else was
going to be doing for that day, I mean,

how the hell are you going to celebrate it?
People were saying, oh, newspaper accounts:

Some of the buildings will fall over
because they will be packed - everyone

with an apartment on the river will have
hundreds of people in each apartment.

So I remember distinctly that day, my
brother had set up for me - my brother

Phillip is a member of the club at the
top of the World Trade Center - so Sam and

I went down, we set on the 107th
floor overlooking the Statue of

Liberty, looking over the ships, drinking
champagne.

He said, this to me is like the America
of my childhood. We all felt so proud of

Old Glory, you know, and
to hear Sam, who was

so urbane, and to a New
Yorker's sense very

European, you know, he was just like a kid
that day. I'll never forget it: we were

just having a hell of a good time as a
bunch of Americans on our 200th birthday

and none of us looked
any less for the wear.

In 2001, I was the chief conductor of the
BBC Symphony in London. One of the jobs

of the conductor is to do the Last Night
of the Proms at the Albert Hall. The

concert was to take place on September 15,
and clearly four days before that the

tragedy that was 9/11 struck; and I said
that we needed to play the Barber Adagio.

The reason for that is that even though it
was not intended as a piece of memorial,

since the time of Roosevelt it's served to
be exactly that. For the English it's the

same with the Enigma Variations, the
beautiful Nimrod variations is their way of

mourning. Other people
use the slow movement

from either the Eroica
or Beethoven's Seventh.

Some use the Adagietto
from Mahler Five. Here

in the States, when there
is some sort of loss,

the Barber Adagio serves that purpose.

Music has that way of somehow unifying
people in tragic times. It's sad that the

Barber Adagio has fallen into this
category, because in some ways it's a

mournful work, but it's also simply a
passionate work of feeling, one of the

most expressive pieces in
the entire musical canon.

I try to divorce myself from the
extra-musical meaning that some people have

associated; but on that night, on
September 15, 2001, there was no getting

around it. And when the performance is
over, I'm shattered: I came off the stage

and I collapsed in the
dressing room. I still

had to go out and conduct
a little more, but it

had truly gotten to me in a way that no
other piece of music ever had.

My name is John Corigliano, and I'm a composer,
and was a good friend of Sam Barber.

On September 11, my friend Bill Hoffmann
called who lives down on Prince Street,

and whose windows overlook the
World Trade Center; and of course, stayed

by the television as every other human
being did practically all day. And when I

did go out, after the
buildings all collapsed,

I walked to Broadway and I saw lines and
lines of people walking uptown to their

homes, because there was no subway
service, and none of them were talking.

Not a word. Just complete silence. Just
the kind of silence you get when you're

really faced with something that's not
on a TV or movie screen: the real thing.

It was quite a scene to see hundreds and
hundreds of people walking to their

homes without anything
they could say to each

other, because there was
nothing to be said.

I don't know if music helps; that depends
on the person. If the person can be

soothed by music and get out of the
state they're in,

that's wonderful. I don't think music
would help me in a situation like this.

I didn't listen to music to get myself
to feel better. I just sat in my house

here, and wondered what
was going to happen next.

My name is Thomas Larson, and I'm
the author of "The Saddest Music Ever

Written: The Story of Samuel Barber's
Adagio for Strings." Barber's true love was

an Italian man named Gian-Carlo Menotti,
who would later go on to be a famous

opera composer. The pair met when they were
teenagers in the late 1920s at the Curtis

Institute of Music where they were both
students in Philadelphia. There's a

famous photograph of Menotti and Barber
taken that summer, 1936, in which someone

captured the two of them in this sort of
romantic pose: they're standing

side-by-side, and they both have this
absolutely divine grin on their

faces. I don't know what they were looking
at, but there's this photograph which

captures this sense of elan in their lives.
So in the summer of 1936,

Barber and Menotti found
themselves in this small town,

St. Wolfgang in Austria. They rented a
chalet, overlooking a lake, and that summer

Barber decided to write a string quartet.
He knew he'd done something monumental,

because September 19, 1936,
he sent a letter to a friend

of his, Orlando Cole, a cellist in the
Curtis String Quartet, saying that he had

finished the slow movement of his string
quartet. And he used the boxing metaphor

common at the time: he called it a
"knockout" - and there is a quality about

the piece that sort of knocks you into
an altered state of consciousness, which

I think of as deep grief, because the
music has a way of pulling you down into

that, holding you, and
then sort of releasing

you from it, that you've done your penance.
This is an old, old element of music:

That music through repetition,
through a kind of minimalist

focus on a particular emotion, has been
sort of absent from Western music for a

few centuries. One of the legacies of
Barber's Adagio is that it sort of brought

back this idea: keeping the
listener there, you're sort of,

your hands nailed to the cross, as it
were, in this piece - is a good thing.

Certainly since the 1970s, composers
like John Adams, Philip Glass,

like Henryk Górecki the Polish
composer, or Arvo Pärt the Estonian

composer, have all worked with minimal
materials to maximize emotion. And this

is in part a legacy of Barber's ability to
put the melancholia of his own personality

so deeply and so fixedly into
a single piece of music.

I'm gonna be, I'm gonna be
at half notes. I'm gonna

be at half notes. And,
um, I'm taking on the

slightly, maybe faster side of the Adagio;
but I'm thinking, you know, like 80 to the

quarter note; 76, 80, something like that,
but I'm definitely beating half notes.

I think when we look at pieces of music
that reflect national mourning, you have to

ask yourself one question: if not the
Adagio, what piece? I think from what

I know, talking to people who were very
close to him, he was bothered that this one

piece had caused so much attention to
the detriment of some of the other works.

But in his lifetime, he was a successful
composer. You can only count on your

one, maybe half another hand, the
Americans who in their lifetimes

as composers achieved that degree of
notoriety. And Barber must have felt that.

It's better to be remembered for
one piece than none at all.

Our culture does a lot of things well.
But one thing we don't do is to grieve

national losses in the kind of depth and
with sustained respect that we do when

this music is played. Our monuments to
sorrow in our culture are few. Barber's

Adagio is one of them, but there aren't
enough. That piece of music is often an

opportunity to remind us that we can
grieve as a culture, that we should

grieve. That things like the Iraq War, the
Afghanistan War, the Korean War, the

Vietnam War: all of these things have
wounded our nation very deeply. And I

don't think we've ever spent enough time
grieving the losses that these wars and

their unresolved natures
have brought upon us.

It's really well felt.
It's believable, you

see; it's not phony,
he's not just making it

up because he thinks that would sound
well. It seems to come straight from the

heart, to use old-fashioned terms!
The sense of continuity, the sense of

steadiness of the flow; the satisfaction
of the arch that it creates

from beginning to end makes you believe the
sincerity which he obviously put into it.

Well, since I know the Adagio for Strings
quite well from the inside, I would propose

to guess at the subject
matter: I think it's a love

scene. I think it's a detailed
love scene. Bed scene!

So, you make an Agnus Dei
out of it, it'll work!

But there's an awful
lot of rubbing around!

I never asked Sam, why should I?
I could have. But I

don't like to tell people
what their music is about.

My name is Jenny Oaks Baker, and I
am a concert violinist and a mother.

I recently performed the Barber Violin
Concerto with Alexandria Symphony and

other orchestras throughout the country.
I've always felt a real affinity to

Barber because he attended the same
music school that I went to. We were

both very young when we went to the
Curtis Institute of Music, and Curtis

is a really special place - and I can see
why Barber is such an amazing composer

because he did have the Curtis
experience to draw from.

The Curtis Institute of
Music is in Philadelphia.

It's probably the most prestigious music
school in the world. If you're able to

get into Curtis, your entire tuition
is paid for, so it's very exclusive

and it's a real privilege to be able to
go there. When I went to Curtis and I

found out Barber had gone to Curtis,
I immediately just had this desire to

play the Concerto, and then I heard
it and just fell in love with it.

Curtis is pretty remarkable: they took
an old mansion - Mary Louise Curtis

Bok, her father owned the Curtis Publishing
Company, and that had the Saturday

Evening Post, and I believe, Ladies Home
Journal, and she took this fortune in the

beginning part of the 20th century,
and she donated all this money to an

endowment and started a music school
for gifted young musicians. And she

purchased this beautiful mansion in the
center of Philadelphia, right around

a square called Rittenhouse Square that's
just as picturesque a square as you

can imagine, with park benches and a
fountain and beautiful trees, and

it's just a really happy
little square in Philadelphia.

They converted all the bedrooms into
practice spaces and teaching studios and

classrooms, and it's just - you walk in
there, and you feel like you're in the

middle of history, and the wood is dark
and the fabrics are lush, and it's very -

it's a very welcoming, warm wonderful
place, and just walking in there you feel

like an artist. But my first year was a
pretty new experience, because I was just

living alone by myself in Philadelphia;
I would get there as soon as I

could in the morning, Monday through
Saturday, and leave when they closed down:

the security guard came through the
practice rooms and locked them all up at

eleven; he would kick me
out every single night.

I'm Kim Allen Kluge, music
director of the Alexandria

Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D.C.;
I am also a composer. I think the fact that

Samuel Barber started his Violin
Concerto with the solo violin is

extremely telling. Why? Because the violin
amongst we poor instrumentalists, you

know, who don't get to use our voice, probably
comes closest to the sound and to the

expressivity of the human voice - which
goes to, kind of the heart of a really

powerful Barber trait. To start that
concerto with the violin, it's almost

celebrating the vocality of the violin.

That slow movement: I know
a lot of commentators make

references to Johannes Brahms; when I
listen to that second movement, when I

perform it, I do really feel the spiritual
and musical kinship to Brahms

who, like Barber, perhaps was somewhat
underappreciated. One of the reasons is

that their emotions, especially when I
think of that second movement, there's so

much gravitas: maybe for some people
that's too much, it's too much

compression of feeling and emotion! But

oh, when you're open to it,
there's nothing like it.

Barber was commissioned to write what
he thought was a concertino, actually

he called it that, for Iso Briselli who was
a fellow classmate, and Barber worked on

the concerto during the summer
of 1939, but in August, all

Americans were forced to leave Europe
because of the impending invasion of

Poland by the Nazis. He hoped he
could finish the work in France, in

Paris, but of course in September 1939
you don't want to be in France, because

the Germans are coming. And he had to
leave France in a hurry; but we could say

that the first two movements of the Violin
Concerto have a European flavor, and

yeah, you could hear something like
turmoil of these times in Barber's

music. And even if Barber deeply disliked
any programmatic connections with his

music, of course the finale of the
concerto has something extremely

dramatic, and you can't help to think
of the war beginning in Europe.

He brought the two movements of the
concerto back, and he showed them to

Briselli in October. He had been working
in seclusion, and dealing with his

father's illness at the same time. So in
October when he brought them to Briselli,

Briselli liked them very much, but he
wanted a third movement and he wanted more

virtuosity in the third movement that
would display his ability. So Barber set

out to write it. What Barber
didn't know was that the

first performance was scheduled with
Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia

Orchestra for January. And so, by the time
he gave Briselli the last movement of it,

Briselli was able to play it, but he didn't
have time to bring it "up to snuff,"

as it were, before that performance. So
the two of them agreed that they would

cancel the commission, and somebody else
would give the first performance. There's

a lot of mythology that has been created
about this third movement; there are

program notes written even today that
propagate the fallacy that Briselli was

not able to play it, that Barber wanted
to create a movement that he couldn't

play: none of this is true, and the reason
I can say that it's not true, is because the

documentary evidence - letters, interviews -
that I've conducted prove otherwise.

When Barber was touring Europe with his
friend Chuck Turner, the violinist, it was

at the beginning of the 50s, I guess.
There were these rehearsals in Paris

before performing the concerto in
Germany, and Barber was looking for a

pianist to accompany Turner. And there was
this young composer who needed money:

and, what about hiring him for the
rehearsal? So Barber agreed, and it was

Pierre Boulez, which is kind of...really
funny, and surrealistic at the same time.

And Boulez did the work, and played the
piano, and...I would pay big money to have a

recording of his sessions! But the

funny thing of the story
is that during the breaks,

Boulez, being Boulez, had this little book
note where he wrote for Barber all kinds

of advice on the writing of serial music.
So somewhere, there is a book note

by Boulez with advice to Samuel Barber
on how to write music a la Schoenberg.

In 1945 Koussevitsky commissioned a work
to be performed by Raya Garbousova,

a rather prominent cellist, but because
he was concerned about the way the

composition would go, he did something
which became a pattern with him for the

rest of his life. He invited Garbousova
to come up to Capricorn and play through

her entire repertoire, essentially,
so that he could understand what her

talents and predilections were utilizing
the whole range of the instrument. And

she was particularly, as she said:
everybody thought that the way to break

somebody's heart was to vibrate on the
low registers of the cello. But she had

the gift of being able to play in the
upper registers with ease, and so that's

why the Cello Concerto has so many
difficult passages. It's considered by

virtually every famous cellist to be

one of the most difficult
pieces in the literature.

The concerto was well received,
and at one point Barber studied

conducting in the effort of recording
some of his works, with UK Decca. The

cellist was Zara Nelsova, and there's a
funny story that goes along with this.

Nelsova comes in for one of the rehearsals
and she starts to play, and the first

cello was so just distraught about how
nobody could measure up to her, that he

took his cello and
he bashed it, and it

broke into smithereens, and
everybody was horrified.

Well it turns out it was a practical
joke: he had bought a really cheap cello

and that was just sort of to add
some humor to the whole experience.

I remember reading actually in Barbara
Heyman's book about the review of the Barber

Cello Concerto, which essentially said:
in the coda of the second movement, an

American composer dares to express himself.
The idea that it was such an

important thing for an American to be
able to write music that was so clearly

from the heart, is what
really makes that special.

I think Barber is one of the great
composers of melancholic music. You know,

examples: all three of the slow movements
of his concerti. The piece that really

got me to love Barber and to love
really all of 20th century music,

the piece that opened up that world to
me, was the slow movement of the Cello

Concerto. In absolute, sort of blissful
agony of melancholy: I mean there's this

opening melody that eventually is
transformed from the low register of the

cello, deeply inward and singing, to this
extremely high climactic moment that is

absolutely sublime. It's very quiet, and
it's sort of reaching to the heavens, and

at the same time it's a very inward
gesture. It's a spectacular feat, and it's

something that happens in his music
often, and I think that very few

composers have done
melancholy as well as Barber.

Well, I had the great privilege of
conducting the Philadelphia premiere of

Barber's Cello Concerto at the Curtis
Institute, and I was really blown

away that it had never been performed in
Philadelphia before. It's an incredible

piece, but it's also a very modernistic
piece, and I'm not sure why it hadn't

been performed by the Philadelphia
Orchestra, but it's an incredible

piece. But it is also not an
easy-access piece like his Adagio.

By all accounts I think Sam Barber was a,
he was a reserved person: he didn't wear

his heart on his sleeve, so to speak.
Yet in his music I think we can all sense

this intense emotional connection.
I think yet at the same time he's always

aware of the classical form and keeping
things in check, and in many, many ways

I think because of that his music has
greater emotional payoff, because he's

all about pacing, he's all about arrival,
architecture - you know, he's a composer

who uses a small amount of material to
develop very, very fully and arrive at a

high point in this pieces. Yet at the
same time, there's a romantic element

that I absolutely adore. The music
for the ballet Medea underwent

many changes from its initial version as
Cave of the Heart. Barber worked closely

with Graham who gave him essentially,
I won't call it a "libretto," but the

storyline that she wanted to emphasize.
And his score got rave reviews, in spite

of the fact that the choreography wasn't
really fully developed when they gave

the first performance. And then later,
he decided to revise it as an orchestral

suite, and then many years later, maybe a
decade later, he revised it into a one-

movement work which I call a tone poem,
the work that we know today, and it's

called Medea's Meditation and Dance of
Vengeance. And that work, when it was

performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra,
Barber measured its success by

how many little white-haired old ladies
walked out of the performance in the

middle of it, because it was so radical
for him! And the thing that is so really

important about that music is that it
shows him developing a step into the

20th century in a way that he hadn't
quite done before. There's a lot more

dissonance which is used, again, for the
sake of expressiveness. Barber never used

dissonance for its own sake.

You know, I guess I'm of the belief
that all music is program music, all

music is narrative. The short,
15-minute Medea's Dance of

Vengeance is really a perfect little
piece: it's all about the narrative, of

course, because the story of Medea is so
vibrant and violent and brutal. It's very

ominous, it's very unrelenting, and this
is Medea's true nature coming out. So she

sets about to kill the woman that Jason
has fallen in love with by sending her a

beautiful dress, but it's poisoned:
if she puts it on, it will kill her

which indeed happens, and it gets even
crazier and crazier because then Medea

decides that it's not enough to kill her.
She also is going to kill the children

that she's had with Jason. So it's an
extremely emotional, over-the-top, violent

unrelenting piece.

"Tell us a little bit about how you happened
to write Knoxville: Summer of 1915.

I see the text is by James Agee. How did

you happen to select it for a musical
setting?" / "I had always admired Mr. Agee's

writing, and this prose poem particularly
struck me because the summer evening he

describes in his native southern town
reminded me so much of similar evenings

when I was a child at home." / "But you're not
from Knoxville, are you?" / "No, I lived in

West Chester, Pennsylvania. But I found out
after setting this, Mr. Agee and I are

the same age, and the year he described
was 1915 when we were both 5."

"I see there's a motto on the score.
Let's see, let me read it:

We are talking now of summer evenings in
Knoxville, Tennessee, and the time that I

lived there so successfully
disguised to myself as a child."

"Yes, it seemed to set the mood for the
piece. You see, it expresses a child's

feeling of loneliness, wonder, and lack of
identity in that marginal world between

twilight and sleep." / "Yes, the very opening
lines suggest that mood, don't they? Read

these first few lines here, won't you?" /
"It has become that time of evening when

people sit on their porches,
rocking gently and talking gently..."

Samuel Barber was born on March 9, 1910
in West Chester, Pennsylvania, a little

town about 30 miles from Philadelphia.
His father was a physician and his

mother an amateur pianist. His mother's
name was Marguerite, but she was nicknamed

Daisy, which is significant in terms of one
of his earliest songs. His sister Sarah

who was younger than he: for Sarah
he wrote some of his earliest

songs, and he adored her from the very
beginning; he was very close to her.

West Chester was a predominantly Quaker
town, conservative by nature, and

Barber attended the public schools
there, and he was distinguished by his

classmates: they knew that he was
destined for some greatness, that he was

talented in music in particular. And from
the time he was eight, he knew he wanted

to be a composer - maybe even younger - but
he declared his intentions in a letter

that he wrote to his mother that began
something like this: "Dear mother, for some

time I wanted to tell you my worrying
secret. I intend to be a composer, and I

will be, I am sure, so please, I beg
you, please do not make me go and play

football!" And then he signs, love - and he

underlines love so that there's no confusion,
that he's not being critical of his

mother: Sam.

I'm Margaret Chalfant. I've lived in West
Chester for the last 75 years. I was

next door to the Barber residence on
Church Street. My house was built about

1840. West Chester was a beautiful little
college town. It was very friendly, very

open, very trusting. We never
locked our doors. We had a

little trolley we called the dinkey that
went from the north end of town to the

college in the south end of town. You
could get on it anywhere, even in the

middle of the square. If you just signalled
to the conductor, I think he knew almost

everyone by name. When you walked uptown
you knew almost everybody. And so the

town meant something to you, and if
part of the town had something that

happened to it that needed support,
the rest of us were there to help.

Daisy Barber had the most beautiful
backyard. She had gorgeous roses.

Everything was well-groomed
and well taken care of.

She was very, very proud of Sam. And I
think her sister Madame Louise Homer, and

probably her husband, had a lot to do
with developing Sam's music. My first

introduction to Madame Louise Homer
was, I was working in the office

and I heard this gorgeous voice, and I
couldn't figure where it was coming from,

and I realized that it was coming in the
window right over a window of the Barber

house. So it was Madame
Louise Homer singing;

that whole family was singing.
She had a beautiful voice.

Aiding and abetting Barber's intentions
to be a composer, his ambitions, were his

maternal aunt, his
mother's sister Louise

Homer: that is, Louise Beatty
who was married to

Sidney Homer, a composer, at the turn of
the century, and Louise Homer was one of

the most famous opera singers. She sang
with the Met for many years. But Sidney

Homer wrote his wisdom for more
than 25 years, encouraged him.

It shaped his aesthetic development, and
yet he would not accept complaining.

You know, if Barber was disappointed about
something, he would try to buoy his

spirits and encourage him. Here's
a quote, for example, from one of

Sidney Homer's letters: "The beautiful
thing about art is that quality never

fades out. If it is there, it is there to
stay, and that is what makes the effort,

the patience, persistence, infinite
care and scrupulous conscientiousness

worthwhile. The intense desire to tell
the truth and to create something which

would be an inspiration and incentive
to others is what has led to the

heartbreaking, almost appalling labor on
the part of those who honestly felt that

they had something to say. Everyone who
joins the society in this place pledges

himself to just one thing: sincerity.
He tries to put into form his real feelings,

not feelings he wishes he had. Pretense
has no place here." And the one thing

Homer kept saying to Barber was, look to
your inner self. Sincerity is the most

important word; he uses it over and over
again in his letters. And for Barber, even

from his earliest works, the very first
piano piece that we have which is called

Sadness, and another one which is a very
militaristic war song, he made an effort

to put emotions into music, unlike
Stravinsky who believed that it was

impossible to put emotions into music.
Barber on the other hand sought to

express emotions, and he did.

Knoxville is like I would sing my own
folklore as I do in central Europe or

London or Paris. I would think that Knoxville
would affect people that way: It is

an American product of the sort of flavor,
the wonder of my country actually,

presented so they could understand it too.
It's like a painting, and I think he

said it perfectly. You can hear the
streetcar, you can smell the strawberries,

you can...you can feel the sigh of what it
is: as always, we southerners would lie on

quilts on the grass
at night, to hear all

those strange noises of summer.
It's fabulous.

He always mourned his youth and his youthful
loves, and he had this strange sort

of desire for some real romantic idea
in a certain way. He had this great

sehnsucht for his childhood in West
Chester, and he had a great love for

all the countryside around his home in
Pennsylvania. The text itself has imagery

that is very familiar to an awful lot of
Americans that is going back to a slightly

more innocent America, and days of
rocking chairs on front porches, the

trolley screaming on its rails. And
I think these are images that evoke

very positive memories, and Barber
catches that feeling of recollection

through a kind of gauzy
cloud of sweet memory.

"Then the score draws to a quiet close,

and the text is: 'After
a little, I am taken in

and put to bed. Sleep, soft smiling, draws
me unto her, and those receive me who

quietly treat me as one familiar and
well-beloved in that home. But will not,

oh will not, not now, not ever, but
will not ever tell me who I am.'"

My name is Jean-Pierre Marty, and I have
happened to have a, I would say, "career" in

the traditional sense of the word, as a
pianist and as a conductor. I was to be

one of the great hopes of French
piano, and then I happened to develop

problems with my muscular side, and
physiological, which somehow ruled out

the idea of the career as such. But when
I was active as a pianist, I happened

to fall a little by chance on the
sonata of Samuel Barber through the

good offices, could I say, of my teacher
Julius Katchen. I said: You are an

American, do you know the
American composer Samuel

Barber - whom of course he loved - but
that was in the late '40s, you know.

And then years later, I saw on the
piano of Julius that very score

which was, you know, lying around with
other things, and I said, ah, what's that?

And I said, are we going to play it?
And he said, I don't know,

it's very, very difficult - you know,
it was written for Horowitz. And as a

young man, I said, well, can I try to play
- I mean, you know, can I work on it?

I mean, he said, be my guest - you
know, you will see what it is. It is

something! So I took it as a challenge,
which you like to do when you are

16 or 17, I must have been at that time.
And I said, ah, I'm going

to show him that I can play this -
you know, it's not only for Horowitz!

Barber clearly wrote the Sonata with
Horowitz in mind. Horowitz was a

frequent visitor to Capricorn, and he wrote
the first three movements very quickly.

I mean, he just knew: because Barber as
a pianist himself, he knew the piano

inside and out, so he could write for it.
But he had a lot of problems with the

last movement. In general, Barber
had problems with last movements.

He certainly had the least problems
with slow movements, because he could

indulge in the lyricism that
was part of his inner life.

The thing about the Sonata was, it had a
stunning impact on the musical world.

Everybody was waiting for the great
American sonata. Whereas Horowitz gave the

first performance, and had the rights to
it for a certain length of time, then

everybody performed it...including
my piano teacher, who studied it and

that's when he had a heart attack. He didn't
die, but he had a heart attack! And I'm

convinced it was the
Barber Sonata that

did it, you know. At any
rate...that was Frank

Sheridan, by the way. "One thing I've always
wondered, have you ever played your own

Piano Sonata." / "My Sonata?" / "Yes." /
"No no no. I can't. I played it for Horowitz

the first time, I played three movements and
then I fell on the floor." / "But the Fugue

is a tremendously difficult
movement, isn't it?"

"I had to wait for that Fugue
quite a while. And Mrs.

Horowitz called me up and said, why don't
you get finished with that last movement?

She said, you know what kind of a
composer you are, you know what's the

matter with you? And she said in Italian,
"tu sei stitico," which translates: you are

constipated. And this annoyed me very much.
And then I went into my

studio and composed that Fugue, which
has given plenty of pianists trouble.

That was my revenge."

I feel that people have to recognize
that he has left not only to

American music but to music of this
century some works that I think are

here to stay. One of them, for example, the
Piano Sonata. I think it is a great work,

and I don't know of a single piano
sonata in the whole of the modern

repertory that has the strength and
the power of his Piano Sonata. Take a

look at Samuel Barber's life. For much
of it, he is an immensely popular and

successful composer.
But he is never,

never fashionable. There
was always this sense of

reservation, even among people like Aaron
Copland and to a lesser degree Virgil

Thompson who did praise him, but they
felt that in some way he was out of

touch with the moment, with contemporary
values, with the ethos of the time that

he was working in. Now, that didn't matter
a damn to Barber, obviously: he wrote the

music that he wanted to write. But nobody
can be looked upon in this way for long

without starting to feel
it, and he felt it.

He felt it enough that I think it actually
nudged him in the same way that Stravinsky

was nudged after the war into
writing music of greater harmonic

complexity, pieces like the Piano
Sonata which is in the largest sense a

fundamentally traditional statement. But
that's a tough piece of music - tough and

dissonant, and not at all like what you
expect when you listen to Adagio for

Strings - and I don't think that he was
posturing, I don't think there's anything

false in its toughness. But I certainly
think that somewhere in there, he was

thinking something like: Well, I'll
show them, I can play that game too.

And of course, he could. This
is Barber relating the story of

how he met with Scalero after Scalero
studied the Sonata. "Among other things, he

told me he had taken the time to
carefully correct all the mistakes

throughout my Piano Sonata, and that it
sounds much better now. I felt just as I

did 20 years ago making a violent effort
not to show the annoyance coming through

every nook and cranny of my face, even
though I saw the funny side. He ended the

session, dear old maestro, with a typically
tactful remark: 'You are talented.

Why do you write such bad music? You can
do better. Go on, keep working.' And he

vanished into the Milanese fog, looking
very old and very far away from the joys

of our atomic world - erect, unbending,
dissatisfied." This is all related in a

letter that Barber sent to his uncle Sidney
Homer. Sidney Homer, after hearing a

recording of the Sonata, wrote to Barber,
"How about a sonata right now full of

peace and happiness, while the iron is hot?
Don't you feel the urge?"

The Library of Congress is, you know, the
largest public library on the face of

the planet, the greatest public library
since the library of Alexandria. For the

American people, they need to know
that the Library of Congress is the

largest shoebox of our stuff that was ever
built. It's all ours, it's open source, at

the very essence of what that means.
It is a glorious collection, and I avail

myself of that. I love this place, I love
this building, I love this hall - I think

I'd like to be probably buried in one
of these columns here in the Jefferson

Building - only the Jefferson Building, I'm
not crazy about Washington, D.C., but

I love this building.

Barber was treated very nicely by Elizabeth
Sprague Coolidge who was a friend of

his aunt's, and who thought highly of his
music. She commissioned him to write

songs for her birthday party which was
an annual event of the Library of

Congress, since she was a big contributor
in shaping the Music Division of the

library. His first trip to Ireland,
he went to Donegal, and Barber became

aware of these poems written by Irish monks
on the edges of manuscripts. Some of

them were rather bawdy, and some of them
were concerned with finding solitude,

peace. And he decided
to compose the songs

which have become known as the Hermit
Songs. Then he was trying to find the right

singer, and he landed of course on the
young Leontyne Price. Beginning in those

early days in the '50s, I was a very
devoted friend of Sam, as I called him

affectionately, which I think is a very
important special marriage - and I had that

with Sam. There was an invitation in
Washington, D.C. to do a premiere with him

of the Hermit Songs, and we did it -
and it was a premiere which is

catalogued in the Library of Congress
as really, you know, the first

performances, with great success. This is a
sketchbook that I looked at when I first

began my work on Samuel Barber. It is at the
Library of Congress, and this is sort of

where it all began for me. I went through
every page: he had identified some of

these sketches, but when I got to the
last page in particular, there was a

quotation that just blew me away. And
it's a quotation, the words of Franz

Liszt from - I tracked
it down - "Memoirs of a

Bachelor Musician - and this is the quote,
in Barber's handwriting: "There is a

degree of innovation beyond which
one does not pass without danger.

Lamartine had the gift of seizing the
exact point of permissible innovation."

When I read this, I had an epiphany: And I
said, oh my god, this is Samuel Barber's

credo: he used modernist language insofar
as it did not compromise melody, lyricism

and tonality. And that put a perspective on
him in terms of his aesthetic principles.

These songs, I think, they bring
together two elements: one, his love of

Irish literature - but the themes
themselves resonated with him. And you

know, I feel the more I live with
Barber - or cohabitate with him, as my

kids say, the more I realize that the
texts that he chooses are usually

biographically pointed. And I always observe
this with the songs he wrote at the

end of his life, Despite and Still in
particular, because they reflect really

this quest for inner
peace that could

only be obtained in a
rural, cloistered setting.

I think that Sam Barber is our Monet;
I said that several times in an interview,

and he loved it. He's
an art impressionist.

By that I thought of some
of the blues and the

reds of Monet as well -
particularly the blues.

There must be, what, 1,000 kinds of blue
in Monet. And the mixture of things: that

each color itself comes very strong at
you, not like the sharp steeliness of a

Van Gogh, but the lusciousness and the
fluidity - that's what I think of

Sam's music. I just think he's one
of the great composers of our time.

I was at the first performance of the
Hermit Songs. Sam played the piano and

Leontyne Price sang them, and that was
one of the great experiences that I recall

hearing music. And of course those
songs I think are extraordinary;

I think they've held
up very, very well.

As you've just heard us play this, we
are interested to know if, as you've

heard it, if that represents pretty much what
you had intended. "Oh yes. I think it's

an excellent performance, very good indeed.
I'm glad you kept the tempo moving

because it's a piece with a good deal of
slow music in it - it's a summer piece, the

feeling of summer, but it mustn't
be too lethargic, in fact it

mustn't be lethargic at all
- it must keep moving,

and you did. I noticed you put on a [trill]
at the end of the bassoon part: where

did that come from?" Well, we
have the original parts from the

Detroit group that first performed it;
Charlie the bassoonist told us about it,

and I kind of like the
first idea you had there.

"I like it too. It's not here but it's alright!"
Someone writing about your music says

that Samuel Barber always uses wind
instruments in an idiomatic way. But it

always requires the greatest virtuosity, and
now I know what they mean! "And I have

them, I have all the virtuosos here
today, so I've been very lucky.

I like to develop - why not? - the
instruments, and call for its...and ask for

its maximum potentialty." Well, I was
going to say that your treatment of

the winds is such
that the parts are

extremely difficult to play,
they require an awful

lot of woodshedding; so many composers write
things that are extremely difficult and

impossible, but I
must say that's

not the case with your music.
Well, Sam, it's certainly

been wonderful to have you here, and I
know that everybody's going to enjoy

Summer Music. And I think that your
contribution is one of the greatest, and we

want to thank you from the bottom of our
hearts. "Thank you very much, thank you."

I'm not one of these conductors who is
into opera the same way others are;

I didn't grow up in a background which had
stage in my blood. But I find myself

drawn to the operas where there's
stronger musical intent. Vanessa per se

as a drama - it's a little slow, not much
happens - five people, and it's sort of a

static work dramatically. But the music
makes this an extraordinary opera. We

were all convinced by the time we'd
done it that we would spur all kinds of

revivals of the work, and that hasn't quite
happened yet, but it should, because this

is an opera that holds its own virtually
with any opera in the 20th century.

It's got great arias,
it has that fantastic

quintet in the last act, it has
a wonderful interlude in it.

Everybody gets something to do.
Barber was invited actually by the Met

to write an opera many years before he
actually wrote Vanessa. His quest for

the right libretto went back as far as
1934 when he wrote to Scalero that he

was anxious to attempt an opera on an
American libretto. Then there were

interruptions because of the war; he had
thought maybe Dylan Thomas, Tennessee

Williams, Stephen Spender, the list goes on
and on and on. But he knew that he needed

an original libretto, and finally he
writes to his Uncle Sidney, "You'll never

guess who agreed to do it." Of course,
Gian-Carlo. Menotti wrote into

the libretto many, many allusions to
Barber's preferences: French food, ice

skating, Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard
which was one of Barber's favorite plays.

There was a true collaboration here.
Menotti who wrote the libretto does

believe that Vanessa was more like Sam,
and Anatole, I guess, more like him.

Sam/Vanessa was the romantic, the dreamer.
Then of course he had to find the right

singer for the role of Vanessa. He started
with Maria Callas, who came to

visit him at Capricorn, bringing her
little dog with her, and she apparently

decided not to do it, probably
because she noticed that the

role of Erika would upstage her. And lo
and behold, Eleanor Steber stepped in,

learned the part in
record time, and she

said, "Vanessa was my role - I lived her
life! I know about Anatole!" That's what

she told me anyway. He added
certain things at the last minute.

Rosalind Elias, who played the young
Erika, was very upset that she didn't

have an aria - everybody
else had an aria - and

for her, he wrote very quickly the song
Must the Winter Come So Soon, which is

surely one of the most beautiful arias
in the opera. It really could serve as a

stand-alone art song.

A great event happened in 1960
when the Academy of Music, this

fabulous concert hall, home of the
world-renowned Philadelphia Orchestra,

received a brand new pipe organ by the
legendary firm Aeolian-Skinner. This organ

was given by Mary Curtis Bok, and to
celebrate this occasion she commissioned

Samuel Barber to write Toccata Festiva.
Now, what brings it so close to me is the

fact that Samuel Barber knew there was
one organist and only one organist that

could pull off his vision for this
piece, and that was Paul Callaway, my

predecessor at the Cathedral Choral
Society. Paul Callaway was the organist/

choirmaster at the Washington National
Cathedral; he knew his way around one of

the largest organs in the world. So this
friendship that started out between the

two inspired, I know, Barber to dare to
write whatever his fertile imagination

would create. Every stop, you know,
Barber needed to know just what that

could or couldn't do
in the combinations,

and I think it's one of the most - other
than just the piece orchestrally,

but then you add the organ and you add
particularly the cadenza played by the

feet alone, which was very audacious -
it's something that in my opinion in the

repertoire of organ
concertos stands by itself.

Being out here in this beautiful setting,
this sylvan setting, it's hard not to

understand how a composer could be
inspired to greatness, to beauty, to

all kinds of things. And I'm fascinated
with the effect that it had on

Barber when he was no longer able to
live here at Capricorn in this beautiful

setting, and move back into the city. It
almost created, if you will, kind of like

"writers block": that's not to say that
composers can't work, and often do, under

great hardship - they hardly have
this type of setting to inspire

them. So it's in their mind and their
heart and their soul, but if you

have the added stimulation of a setting
like this, you're fortunate indeed - and

we're fortunate, because precious,
priceless, timeless music was created

right here in Capricorn.

Capricorn was a curious house because
we wanted something that had two

very separate wings,
and our studios would

be far enough from each
other so we couldn't

hear each other, and compose. But at
that time we were just out of Curtis;

it was difficult for us to move there
and to buy it and so on, but

with the help of friends, we were able to buy
the house. And it became a quite famous

house because practically all of New York
intellectuals came through Capricorn

one time or another: not only musicians,
but many writers and painters; people

that you would never think would be our
friends, like Duchamp and Andy Warhol!

It took me a long time to have
had good relations with Barber,

and I'm glad it was going from bad
to good than the reverse. And of

course at Capricorn, I would visit
rather regularly, and when I was invited

for Christmas - of course, they
received tons of Christmas cards, at

the time when Christmas
cards existed - and

there, each year, made
a competition: which

was the worst, the most
awful card that they

would have received, which
was rather indicative: it

was not of the most beautiful; it was
the worst! So that shows that they were

kind of bitchy, you'd say. Okay; so they
had already selected - so we'll ask

Jean-Pierre what he thinks. And it was
a card that John Corigliano had sent -

he was young, a young
man at the time;

I don't know if he had drawn
it himself, or a friend -

anyway, it showed...it was a diptych with
Jesus Christ whipping deer, you know,

and Santa Claus
nailed on the cross.

That was that. So, what
do you think, Jean-Pierre?

What could I say? To be very honest,
I don't follow your...it's a

fact that Christmas is an ambivalent
feast, and it's also a pagan feast which

has nothing to do with it, and the two are
mixed, and often the church complains...

In other words, I was not horrified.
And that stirred up a very hot

discussion. I mean, I remember I said,
I'm sure Nadia Boulanger would have been

shocked, I said that - that probably was
the wrong thing to say, because Nadia

was of course "La bon chrétien," and of
course that would have been unthinkable

for her, but I said: at Capricorn, you
know, you should be a little more

broad-minded and all that. And Barber
said, "Well I think we should stop this

discussion, after all this is a Christian
house!" I still hear him. And it left, you

know, I mean, and then it just went from
bad to worse at the time, that I said to

Gian-Carlo, I'm going home. And he said,
"well, you know, he's in a bad mood,

you are not the first to have that -
please, bambino..." That is the truth,

and John Corigliano, I don't know
if he knows that I took his defense

with great, great gusto!

What kind of relationship did Barber
and Menotti have? This is a puzzling

question, because we really don't quite
know. Were they monogamous? Turns out

they weren't. Did they stray from one
another as a matter of course? It's hard

to tell. Part of the reason is the sort of
fluidity of musicians, composers, dancers,

theatre directors and so on that worked
together at this time. It's hard to

say exactly how open or closed these
relationships were. I think the one thing

we know is that these men came together
artistically first. So on one level this

collaboration, this musical artistic love
sort of didn't die, because both men seemed

to be renewed in their personal lives
by taking new lovers. And yet, they

continued to live together at the house,
in Capricorn, in Mount Kisco; they

continued to work and travel together. They
continued to collaborate on these works.

He wouldn't have liked
even being called gay.

But he was perfectly proud of his
friends who were, like Menotti,

especially the successful ones.
And he had one way of behaving,

you know, in what you might call society;
and then he had another way of behaving

with, say, young male friends. I think he
thought of himself and his private life as

a gentleman first of all, and that
rather old-fashioned way that

people had of being gay. I think
it's gone out of style now, maybe.

But it never did with Sam. In fact I
remember him saying to me not too long

before he died, well
who would ever know I

was homosexual? And I
said, well, Sam, do you

think everyone you know is
going to keep quiet about it?

I talked to Gian-Carlo about
this after Sam's death, and

he said, he kept saying, well, we just
couldn't get along. Things were... Maybe two

composers - you know, like
two pianists: very dangerous.

I think in some ways there may have been
some envy, because Gian-Carlo was a

theatre person. I've
always wondered if

Gian-Carlo just couldn't handle that.
And then of course,

we can't get away from the fact that,
the Schippers relationship - again, it

all started a long time before I even
knew Sam, and I think they just gradually

started going on the rocks.
I think Gian-Carlo was always more

interested in younger men.
I don't think Sam cared, really.

He was attracted by them, but I think he
would have been more than happy to...

he was truly...he was
married to Gian-Carlo,

there's absolutely no
question about it -

he was married. I don't
think Gian-Carlo felt quite

the same thing. But I don't think
that we'll ever know the whole story.

Antony and Cleopatra was Barber's
favorite Shakespearean play, and when you

read the lines, I can understand why.
It is a passionate play about love,

impossible love essentially, and
Barber's score is much more intimate

than the production. Everything
that could have gone wrong

went wrong, and Barber was very, very
upset. "With the stage sets of Antony

and Cleopatra, I was not very happy.
There was sort of a great number of

things going on on the
stage; it was hard to

hear the music - I think Leontyne Price
told me she held onto her wig and

decided it was either the opera or
herself, or the music, I forget which

it was; she was very gallant about that.
And I did not...I thought that was

mistreated by the man who did the
sets, who shall be nameless."

Sam was talked into using Zeffirelli by
the management of the Met, which was a

great mistake. And of course at that time,
Zeffirelli was very chic - but as

Suso d'Amico in Rome used to say,
Zeffirelli is extremely good with the 13th

production of Rigoletto or something, but
he really cannot do an original production.

The first night itself,
I can testify, was

not a very, very exciting experience for
me, to have a 3-minute cue, and I was

locked into the pyramid after the first aria -
in the pitch dark! - because something

mechanical didn't
open up at the right

time. But I must say, there's
no business like showbiz;

I simply kept singing the thing, in the
pyramid! I'll be heard no matter what!

I remember hearing the premiere
broadcast of Anthony and

Cleopatra on the radio, the Met Saturday
broadcast, and even have a tape of it.

I was enchanted; I was absolutely drawn into
it as a listener. Now, we all know that

the stage didn't function properly, and
it was a social gathering: people were

not ready for quite a long evening in the
theatre; what was it, one critic said

that in-between intermissions they
performed Antony and Cleopatra.

The audience clapped and clapped and clapped.
He was brought to the stage over and

over and over again. That premiere
performance was received with great

glory. Bing had every intention of
performing it again; there are letters to

prove that. But it kept getting delayed,
and the work that should have been the

highest point of his career turned out to
be his nemesis. The viciousness, really

venal quality of those reviews: they
were waiting to get him, and they did.

And the terrible thing is that when
it was played at Juilliard several

years later, everybody who went, knew that
we had seen a great opera. The problem was

it was staged in such an enormously "Cirque
du Soleil" fashion that you really

didn't hear the music. And it was so bad
that he said to me, "I see no reason to

write anymore; I don't - if people don't
want me to write, I won't write." And he

wrote very little after that. He did
write one cantata, some piano pieces, a

movement of an oboe concerto - but no one
expected this. One could expect a bad

review, or negative things in a review,
but not this huge onslaught. And he was a

different man after that; he was not happy.
He moved. But, it wasn't there.

Wasn't there. And how much we lost because
of that is a real shame, because Sam

still had in him great, great music to
write, but we'll never know what that is.

The last years of Barber's life were basically
years without Menotti. Menotti moved

to Yester House in Scotland, and he asked
Barber to sell Capricorn. And after

Antony and Cleopatra's failure, that was a
real blow to him, because Capricorn was

the place where Barber wanted to be, and
wanted, I guess, to die, to spend his

last days. But he had to sell it, he had
to move back to New York, and he was not

comfortable in big cities. He writes
something in a letter that he is a boy

from the country, and he doesn't
want to live in big buildings in

New York. So even in a wonderful location
like Manhattan's Fifth Avenue, he wasn't

comfortable, he was
sad, and he was alone.

You know, his musical loves
changed from age to age, and he

started with Brahms, then he went through
a certain influence of Sibelius, and then

at the end, the last years,
he played only Bach,

only Bach. He had bought the Gesellschaft,
and that was his great love, and

when he sat at the piano, it
was always to play some Bach.

I don't think he was very, that interested
actually in orchestrating. I don't feel

Sam's soul in the style of orchestration.
But at the same time, he often

said the color of the orchestra doesn't
really interest me that much, because I

feel that the valid musical values should
remain the same, it doesn't matter

what instrument you use - the orchestra
in a hundred years will be a completely

different kind of orchestra, and then what?
What will happen to all those wonderful

little sounds of Debussy
and Ravel and so on?

He always said, Bach, look at Bach: you play
Bach on the harmonica, or you play it on

the guitar, or on the organ:
it's always wonderful.

I'm fascinated with how important Bach
was to Barber. There is a wonderful

integrity to the structure of his writing -
he doesn't waste notes. And it

also transcends normal formality and
formalism; I mean, in the same way that

people who don't understand Bach,
they think of him as this, again,

traditionalist, this old-fashioned guy,
but he knew and could write in all

the styles - in any of
the styles - whenever

he cared to. Towards the end of his life,
when that's all he played, when he

would go to Bach like you go
to the Bible, is because Bach

is apart from everything else: in the
sense that it's something eternal.

It's something...it's an eternal truth.
It's nice to have a few mysteries in

life, and when you approach death, when
you're at the end, you know, you think

about a lot of things; but that composer
and that music and that person,

I think of it like a god. I mean,
just something that has been with

you on one level all through your life,
and will be with you in the life to come.

My name is Calvin Bowman, and I'm
an Australian composer. I've loved

Bach since my teenage
years, and at that point

I began to play the organ, and started to
explore the big preludes and fugues, the

passacaglias and the big
choral preludes. In 2009,

I played all the Bach organ works at once.
So, for 17 hours, I sat and played

Bach non-stop, virtually. It was what
I would describe as a transcendental

experience, and it was as though I could
see the inner workings of the universe

as I was playing. And I guess throughout
his life, Sam Barber turned to that music

in order to make sense of his existence,
especially in times of crisis.

And in the end, turning to Bach in that
way was something akin to a religious

experience for him. I'm not what
I'd describe as a sad person,

but there's a deeply felt
melancholy within my

soul, and that all comes out in my music.
And Sam Barber inspires me to do that.

And in some ways, by
listening to his music

and studying his music, I know it's safe to
do so. He says to me, it's alright to be

lyrical, and it's alright
for you to explore

the recesses of your heart.
And sometimes

those places are a little sadder, but there's
beauty to be found in those recesses.

So, for many years I've been collecting
Barber memorabilia. In my collection I have

various manuscript drafts, I have
signed scores, and this obsession has

culminated in the purchase
of his childhood Steinway.

More by good luck than
design, I came across

Sam Barber's childhood Steinway -
No. 220601 -

for which he wrote a piece called To My
Steinway. So clearly, it's a piano that he

loved very much, even at that tender age.
Unfortunately, it was in fairly

deplorable condition, so what we're doing
is we're saving Barber's Steinway. So it's

currently being fully restored, and it's
going to be a piano that I can use once

it has been fully restored; it can't be
a museum piece for me, it needs to be

something that I can
compose and work upon.

My name is Melissa Fogarty. I'm a soprano.
I've been living with

Samuel Barber songs for 20 years, and
I just made a recording of 23 of his songs

and it's called
Despite and Still.

I actually started singing professionally
at age 11, and had a very

charmed life around that, singing solo
children's roles at the Met, at City Opera,

Sarasota Opera; it was
a dream childhood, in

that regard. In the late aughts, I
really started to gain some success and

credibility and notoriety as
an artist in New York City.

And then it started to dry up. And so the
question was, well what now? Should I

go back to school,
do something else?

Is there really any point in
auditioning in the incredible

competition? And...the answer is, yes,
there is. But how about doing your

own thing, just going with your own gut,
and not really worrying about, you know,

getting into this opera or whatever. But
it's not easy. And so Despite and Still

resonated with me: in particular, the
first song, which is actually called the

Last Song, taken from the poem A Last Poem,
in which the poet Robert Graves says,

"A last song, and a very last, and yet
another - O, when shall I give over?" And

to me, I think he's saying, do I keep writing,
or in this instance do I keep singing?

Do I have anything else to say as an
artist? Is there anyone listening?

Does anyone care? Why am I doing this?
And also, Despite

and Still: to me, that's the answer to
the question. It's the last piece of the

cycle, and I think it more has to do with
a struggling relationship. One thing I

think is really beautiful, and I wrote it
in my program notes, is that he died in

Menotti's arms. So even though they
separated, they still had that

connection. And how could they not? They
stayed together for decades. So even

though things didn't work out, I think deep
down they still deeply loved each other.