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Home , Jean Sibelius, Samuel Barber

American Musics Samuel Barber, Jean Sibelius, and the Making of an American Romantic

Howard Pollack Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/84/2/175/1209912 by guest on 01 October 2021

The common designation of Samuel Barber as a romantic or neo- romantic seems accurate enough as far as it goes.1 One need only consider the many "appassionato" and "espressivo" markings that dot the composer's scores, not to mention his two rather torrid grand operas, (1957) and Antony and Cleopatra (1966), or the more impassioned of his love songs. , a lifelong friend, described Barber as "essentially a romantic personality," as someone "a bit more sentimental than I am."2 (Menotti apparently mirrored their divergent temperaments in his for Vanessa by way of the prag- matic Anatol and the ardently idealistic Erika.) In discussing music, Barber himself often emphasized emotional response, stating in 1935, for instance, "The universal basis of artistic spiritual communication by means of art is through the emotions."3 Moreover, Barber had a strong and decisive affinity for and poetry. In the years just prior to those two 1931 works—Dover Beach and the to The School for Scandal—that mark the begin- nings of his first maturity, he went through a particularly keen Brahms phase. This included, in 1928, purchasing an autographed manuscript of Brahms in Venice and the composer's complete works in , where Barber and Menotti took rooms on the city's Brahmsplatz. In that same year, Barber performed Brahms's with a Curtis Institute friend en route to Europe and some of Brahms's pieces at school. "My friendship with Sam developed under the wings of Brahms's music," recalled Menotti, who met Barber upon arriving at Curtis in 1928.4 Bar- ber's music from this period—including not only the for , op. 1 (1928) and his setting of A. E. Housman's "With Rue My Heart Is Laden" (1928), but also a violin (1928) and a piano (1930), both lost or destroyed—widely reminded listeners of Brahms. Barber remained a lifelong admirer of not only Brahms but also Schubert, Schumann, and other nineteenth-century . "How much Schubert, even in a four-hand arrangement, can say to us ... !" he

175 176 The Musical Quarterly

wrote to his uncle, the composer Sidney Homer, in 1952.5 And although his strong identification with Brahms around 1930 accompanied a mo- mentary disenchantment with Wagner, by 1936 he found himself "in a very Wagnerian state" after hearing Furtwangler conduct at Bayreuth.6 Barber's conservative musical tastes evolved under the guidance of his uncle Sidney as well as Rosario Scalero, his composition teacher at

Curtis from 1924 to 1933. Homer, who saw himself as part of an Ameri- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/84/2/175/1209912 by guest on 01 October 2021 can tradition that included George Whitefield Chadwick, Arthur Foote, and , developed an ardent appreciation for Beethoven and Brahms while studying with Chadwick in Boston and Josef Rhein- berger in Munich; some of his own songs cast a distinctly Brahmsian profile, if somewhat sentimentalized.7 Barber held both Homer and his music in high esteem, penning a deeply appreciative preface to an an- thology of his uncle's songs in 1943.8 Barber's earliest known songs, such as "The Daisies" (1927), to a text by the Irish poet (whose poetry Homer also set), stem directly from Homer's work; one hears, too, an echo of Homer's "How's My Boy?" in the "Sophocles" sec- tion of Dover Beach. Scalero, meanwhile, had derived his pedagogical methods from Eu- sebius Mandyczewski, an associate of Brahms's who in turn had studied with the Beethoven authority Martin Gustav Nottebohm.9 Scalero him- self had known Brahms, whom he "worshipped."10 This admiration for Brahms complemented Scalero's veneration for the Italian masters of the Renaissance and baroque, a subtle connection that Barber seems to have absorbed. Barber's aesthetic principles early on gained further support from Gian Carlo Menotti, whose own conservatism eventually involved writ- ing operas along the lines of Puccini. Barber and Menotti, lovers for a number of years, quickly formed a two-man antimodernist front, dis- paraging the music of their immediate elders as experimental and cere- bral. After meeting , the so-called bad boy of music, in Vienna in 1928, Barber wrote to his family, "He [Antheil] says that he is glad to see that my decade of composers is aware of the faults and extrav- agancies of his own, and that we are profiting by their mistakes."11 In the late 1920s and 1930s, Barber and Menotti remained detached from nearly the entire new-music scene both at home and abroad, gravitating toward conservative Vienna—when not spending time in rural hide- aways—as opposed to Paris, , or . When Toscanini championed Barber's and First Essay in 1938, tensions between Barber and his more progressive colleagues led to a sharply worded debate in , with Ashley Pettis denouncing Barber and Toscanini as reactionaries and Menotti defending Barber by responding, "It is time for someone to make a reaction against a school of composition that has bored concert audiences for twenty years."12 Barber and Sibelius 17 7

At the same time, Barber's actual musical language derived not so much from the music of the Romantic era as from postromantic styles of the early twentieth century. This appears to be the case even with Barber's first recognized work, the Serenade, completed in December 1928 when the composer was only eighteen years old. The music's con- servatism—and, for an eighteen-year-old, its remarkable suavity—appar-

ently obscured its modernity from Nathan Broder and Russell Edward Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/84/2/175/1209912 by guest on 01 October 2021 Friedewald, both of whom compared the work to 's Italian Serenade.15 Sidney Homer, who felt wary about the Serenade's "almost too apparent maturity," arguably showed greater discernment in this re- gard. "It seems as if you are going to skip 'youth,' " he warned his young nephew, "and jump into the Maelstrom and complexities of a mature man."14 The Serenade's modernity, such as it is, is immediately heralded by the opening un poco adagio introduction to the first movement, marked allegro con spirito. Although largely a dominant preparation for the A- centered music to follow, the triadic harmonies, even when thoroughly unexceptional, move in ways largely new to the twentieth century. The opening phrase (Ex. 1), for example, progresses from to to C minor before arriving at a modally ambiguous cadence suspended between A minor and F major; such modal and enharmonic ambiguities, found throughout the work, anticipate Barber's mature harmonic lan- guage at its most characteristic. This introduction contains other features, beyond its modal- chromatic language, that bespeak some contact with modernism, including its somewhat constructivist and irregular phraseology. More- over, the forms of all three of the work's movements reveal a certain idiosyncratic brevity and concision, including a lack of heightened contrast and an avoidance of literal repetition, that cannot be ascribed simply to the limitations of a young composer still learning his craft. From the evidence adduced from Barbara Heyman's critical biogra- phy, as well as from the music itself, the sources for Barber's modernity would seem to include, above all, Debussy, Ravel, Strauss, Scriabin, and Sibelius. Barber would eventually come closer to more daring styles and by the time of the Serenade may have already adapted something from Stravinsky: shortly before composing the piece, he heard the Russian conduct his Apollon musagete in Paris, a performance that prompted some kinder remarks about Stravinsky than usual. But Barber's deeper affinity remained to those older figures contemporary with Debussy. One detects the influence of one or another of these early Euro- pean modernists in nearly everything Barber wrote. Such eclecticism sometimes threatens the integrity of his larger compositions in particu- lar; but his work remains intact thanks not only to certain distinctive stylistic trademarks, but, concomitantly, to his own personality, one Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/84/2/175/1209912 by guest on 01 October 2021

Un poco adagio V Violin I

Violin II

Viola

Violoncello und Double Bass

D.B. tacet + D.B.

Example I. Samuel Barber, Serenade for String Quartet, first movement, mm. 1-7 (New York: G. Schirmer, 1942). Copyright © 1942 (Renewed) G. Schirmer, Inc. (ASCAP). International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by Permission. Barber and Sibelius 179 characterized by a heartfelt, intimate melancholy in slower movements and a youthful charm and vigor in faster ones. Still, a full understanding of Barber, one imagines, would require some appreciation of his unique vision and craft in the light of European trends of the early twentieth century. This article takes a much narrower focus, namely, Barber's relation to Sibelius, especially in the 1930s, when

the latter's influence was at its height. In order to help contextualize this Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/84/2/175/1209912 by guest on 01 October 2021 relationship, we begin with a brief consideration of the extraordinary history of Sibelius's reception in the English-speaking world.

Sibelius's symphonic work, on which his international reputation has largely depended, early on won an unusually appreciative following in the United States. Beginning in the and continuing at least through the 1930s, most of America's great conductors and vigorously championed his and .15 In 1914 Sibelius himself traveled to the United States to conduct an all-Sibelius concert at Carl Stoeckel's Norfolk Festival, composing a tone poem, , for the occasion. While in the United States, he also received, at the behest of Horatio Parker, an honorary doctorate from . "I was quite astounded at being so well known in Amer- ica," Sibelius remarked. "I should never have believed it."16 In 1920, he nearly accepted the directorship of the Eastman School, a position sub- sequently proffered to his admirer . Sibelius's popularity in the United States peaked in the 1920s and 1930s.17 , who had overseen the American premiere of the Fifth in 1921, gave seventeen performances of Sibe- lius's works in the 1925-26 season alone, including the American pre- mieres of the Sixth and Seventh Symphonies just weeks apart in April. Later that year, both and Frederick Stock also per- formed the Seventh, while , who had conducted the American premiere of the Fourth, commissioned and launched the world premiere of Sibelius's last major work, the tone poem . During the 1932-33 season, Koussevitzky presented the first complete cycle of Sibelius symphonies. And almost unbelievably, in a single week in November 1933, New York heard Stokowski conduct the Fourth, both Koussevitzky and Artur Rodzinski conduct the First, Otto Klem- perer conduct the Second and the Seventh, conduct the Seventh and The ofTuonela, and Toscanini conduct another tone poem, . In 1934, became the first American-born conductor appointed to a major American —the —partly on his reputation as a Sibelius conductor. And in 1937, the 180 The Musical Quarterly

conductor Erno Rapee offered another complete Sibelius cycle, this one with the Radio City Music Hall Symphony Orchestra. Meanwhile, American orchestras made notable contributions to the ever-growing Sibelius discography, including the premiere recording of the Fourth Symphony by Stokowski in 1932. All this naturally had its effect on the American public; in a 1935 nationwide poll, listeners to New York

Philharmonic broadcasts named Sibelius as their favorite living sym- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/84/2/175/1209912 by guest on 01 October 2021 phonist.18 The media abetted American receptivity to Sibelius, thanks largely to , whose attachment to Sibelius, as described in depth by Glenda Dawn Goss, bordered on the fanatical.19 Influential both as a music critic for the New York Times and as a popular radio personality, Downes regularly declared Sibelius the world's greatest living composer. A number of esteemed publications from Great Britain, where the conductors and Sir presided over a Sibelius furor similar to America's, further enhanced Sibelius's American prestige. These included 's wry look at contemporary trends, Music Ho! A Study of Music in Decline (1936); biographies of Sibelius by Cecil Gray (1931), Karl Ekman, Jr. (1936), Bengt de Tome (1937), and Rosa Newmarch (1939); and on the symphonies by Ernest Newman and Sir Donald Tovey.20 These publications were generally extreme in their praise. Both Gray and Lambert deemed Sibelius the greatest symphonist since Beethoven.21 Tovey did not go this far but opined nonetheless that Sibelius had succeeded where Liszt and Bruckner had failed in solving "the problem of achieving the vast movement of Wagnerian music- drama in purely instrumental music."22 Newman called Sibelius "the most personal, the least derivative, of all the great composers," a claim made in 1933 and maintained after Sibelius's death in 1957.23 At the very least, these writings—especially Gray's biography—helped consoli- date Sibelius's reputation both in Britain and in the United States.24 Most of these critics distinguished such popular early pieces as Fin- landia and En Saga, the first two symphonies, and the , which they regarded as Romantic, from those mature works—notably the last five symphonies and the tone poem, Tapiola—which they considered not only modern but a welcome alternative to the two dominant forms of continental modernism: the Franco-Russian tradition of Debussy and Stravinsky and theA.ustro-German tradition of Strauss and Schoenberg. This notion provided the very essence of Lambert's thesis, which, after reproaching nearly every other living composer, concluded with a paen to Sibelius's music as "seeming to point forward most surely to the fu- ture." "Although, chronologically speaking, of the same generation as Barber and Sibelius 181

Strauss and Elgar," explained Lambert, "he is of all living composers the most interesting and stimulating to the post-war generation. The pre- war revolutionaries have become victims to their own mannerisms, and any attempt to imitate them produces a pastiche of a pastiche."25 Whereas Strauss and Schoenberg were too Wagnerian, this line of thinking continued, and Debussy and Stravinsky were too "violently"

anti-Wagnerian, Sibelius, after a certain point in his development, suc- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/84/2/175/1209912 by guest on 01 October 2021 cessfully bypassed the entire Romantic period altogether, picking up where Beethoven had left off. In contrast to the moribund of Schoenberg and Stravinsky, Sibelius "achieved a genuinely sponta- neous, unconscious, classic art," wrote Gray, who thought the composer's forms analogous to the "pre-Haydn symphonists of the Mannheim school."26 If some British and Americans agreed that Sibelius was, as Laura Gray puts it, "a kind of saviour who . . . seemed to lead the way out of the modern musical predicament," this was partly because the composer thought of himself in such terms.27 "It stands as a protest against present- day music," Sibelius said of his Fourth Symphony shortly after its pre- miere in 1911. "It has nothing, absolutely nothing of the circus about it."28 Some years later, he similarly remarked that whereas his contempo- raries concocted "cocktails," he offered the public "pure cold water."29 While he apparently intended his "circus" remark as a criticism of Strauss and Mahler, and his "cocktails" comment as a jab at Stravinsky,30 Sibelius had little positive to say about any composer after Beethoven aside from Brahms; he showed Schoenberg a grudging respect (one echoed by his minions) and apparently concealed his youthful enthusi- asm for Wagner.31 In 1912, he spoke of his younger colleagues as his "natural enemies."32 Sibelius's disaffection may well have helped pro- mote the kind of cultish quality found among his more fervid admirers. American composers were not immune from all this Sibelius ma- nia, especially in the late 1920s and 1930s, when reaction against Stravinsky and Schoenberg ran high. Howard Hanson announced his kinship to Sibelius with his First Symphony, the "Nordic" (1922), and reaffirmed it in his Second, the "Romantic" (1930).33 's rela- tionship with Sibelius remains more conjectural at this point, though over the years listeners noted resemblances especially between Harris's stirring Third Symphony (1937) and the Sibelius Seventh (1924), both of which were in one movement.34 In England, meanwhile, and became especially associated with Sibelius; they both dedicated their Fifth Symphonies (1932 and 1943, respectively) to Sibelius, Vaughan Williams's original dedication reading, "Without permission and with 182 The Musical Quarterly

the sincerest flattery to Jean Sibelius, whose great example is worthy of imitation." As late as 1955, Vaughan Williams remarked, "I do not count as civilized those mid-Europeans who ignore Sibelius . . . Sibelius has shown us that the new thought which can be discovered in the old material is inexhaustible." And in 1957 he regarded Sibelius, along with Brahms and Walt Whitman, as one of the outstanding figures of recent 35

history. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/84/2/175/1209912 by guest on 01 October 2021 Among still younger American and British composers—those born around 1900—Sibelius enthusiasts included not only Constant Lambert but George Antheil and . Somewhat like Lambert, both Antheil and Walton had initially made their reputations in the 1920s as Stravinskian radicals, only to become converts to Sibelian neoromanti- cism in the 1930s. The frequent performances of Sibelius over the radio made the difference in Antheil's case: "Previously, in Europe, I had heard Sibelius once or twice and thought him impossibly padded," he wrote; "now, however, every note seemed to count. This discovery upset me terribly, for it caused me to think that perhaps I had been utterly off the track for too many years ever to recover." For his part, Walton's reap- praisal of Sibelius involved not only hearing the symphonies at nearly every symphony concert, but friendships with Gray and Lambert.36 Dis- cussing his own First Symphony (1934) in 1981, Walton recalled, "His [Sibelius's] music . . . was not much in the Sitwellian world [referring to Edith and Sacheverell Sitwell] and I got to know it chiefly thro' Con- stant and Cecil Gray and became a great enthusiast for some time, still am for that matter." After hearing 's recordings of the Sibelius symphonies in 1978, Walton declared, "What a composer! Constant and Cecil Gray were very right after all."37 Sibelius's success in England and the United States naturally owed something to the concertgoing public as well as to the efforts of particu- lar musicians and critics; the great American emigre conductors who performed Sibelius rarely did so before arriving in the States. Anglo- American receptivity to Sibelius involved, at the least, popular interest in the symphony as a genre. But in addition, some British and American (and, of course, Scandinavian) listeners responded unusually well to Sibelius—as they had to Grieg—because they perceived him, in distinc- tion to continental Europeans, as a fellow "Northman."38 For someone like Hanson, of Swedish descent, this had a racial component, but mostly the connection was cultural and political. Gray and others made much of as an enlightened, highly literate, feminist democracy that represented Europe's future,39 and Americans further appreciated the fact that Finland was the only country to repay its war debt.40 It is hardly coincidental that Sibelius became a cherished Anglo-American Barber and Sibelius 183 icon at a time of growing alienation from an increasingly totalitarian Eu- rope careening toward catastrophe. Interest in Sibelius declined, significantly, with the onset of the Second World War. Complicating matters was Sibelius's implication in the fascist cause. Sibelius had some right-wing sympathies, supporting the Whites in the 1918 Finnish Civil War41 and writing a patriotic 42

march, 's Fate, for male chorus in 1930 for a fascist organization. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/84/2/175/1209912 by guest on 01 October 2021 When war broke out between Finland and the in 1939, leading to the former's alliance with the Axis powers (1941-44), Sibelius pleaded Finland's cause to the American people and reportedly made public statements of support to German troops.43 Americans, even the deeply pro-Soviet Downes, tended to view all this sympathetically— that is, in light of the country's historic struggle against Russian imperi- alism.44 But it could not help but have a negative impact on Sibelius's reputation in the United States, especially after America entered the war; in 1942, one reader of the New York Times suggested banning Fin- landia from concerts.45 Meanwhile, the Nazis not only sanctioned but coopted Sibelius. In 1934 they published his Song of the Athenians (1899) as Hymne des Wehrwillens. Hitler awarded Sibelius a Goethe Prize in 1936, and Nazi minister Joseph Goebbels founded a Sibelius Society in 1942.46 Al- though Germans by and large had never thought all that much of Sibelius, performances of his music continuously increased during the Third Reich until, by the war years, he emerged as the most often per- formed non-German in symphonic concerts.47 As the Nazis appropriated the idea of Sibelius as Nordic for their own purposes, such associations became increasingly problematic in Britain and the United States. The arrival of Schoenberg and Stravinsky—and many of their friends—in the United States further challenged Sibelius's supremacy. According to Goss, Theodor Adorno and , representing the Schoenbergian and the Stravinskian camps respectively, proved par- ticularly influential in galvanizing knowing opinion against the Finn. After arriving in America in 1938, Adorno interpreted the interest in Sibelius all around him as a kind of fetishism propagated by commercial radio. "The work of Sibelius is not only incredibly overrated," he con- cluded, "but it fundamentally lacks any good qualities. Its principle is the interconnection of trivial bits of traditional music into a whole which lacks any logic or continuity, which is fundamentally incompre- hensible, and which therefore is regarded as 'deep.' "48 Joining the staff of the New York Herald Tribune in 1940 upon his return from France, Thomson similarly wrote, in his very first review, "Twenty years' resi- dence on the European continent has largely spared me Sibelius. Last 184 The Musical Quarterly

night's Second Symphony was my first in quite some years. I found it vulgar, self-indulgent, and provincial beyond all description."49 Moreover, the growing prominence of such composers as Prokofiev, Britten, and Copland made Sibelius seem old fashioned in comparison. Both Prokofiev and Britten themselves found Sibelius, in a word, so- porific.50 In 1941 Copland, too, offered a tough assessment of Sibelius, 51

though more even-handed and sympathetic than is sometimes alleged. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/84/2/175/1209912 by guest on 01 October 2021 Copland's closing remarks, cited here in full, directly addressed the ques- tion of Sibelius's relation to mid-century musical currents: The attempt to set Sibelius up as the great modern composer of our day is certain to fail, not so much because he falls short of the claims made for him but for the simple reason that his music does not grapple with the problems of our own world. It belongs rather with the post- Tschaikovskian world of the early 1900s. This fact is emphasized by the type of composer that has been influenced by the example of Sibelius. Such men are to be found mostly in countries where his work is played frequently: England, the United States, and, of course, his native land. They are composers who feel lost in the mazes of the contemporary id- iom. Sibelius is a refuge to them, since he proves conclusively that a composer need merely treat the materials of music in his own way in or- der to transfuse the commonest chord or theme with meaning. In that sense his influence has been a salutary one. But insofar as his followers use him as justification for escaping the problems of their own time and place, their work is certain to awaken nothing but echoes of a past era.52 The fact that Sibelius never delivered his long-awaited Eighth Symphony—indeed, composed nothing of importance after Tapiola (1926)—gave credence to Copland's argument. With each passing year, the late works, touted by Gray and Lambert as the gateway to the future, could be seen more readily as a dead end. American critical opinion tended to follow Copland's lead, grouping Sibelius with Strauss and Scriabin as a "late romantic" and seeing Mahler and Ives as the forward- looking composers of that generation. This paradigm more or less has held into our own day, although in recent years, some composers, con- ductors, and critics alike have taken a revitalized interest in Sibelius as a modernist or at least premodernist figure.53

While enrolled at the Curtis Institute, Barber regularly attended concerts, where he doubtless heard numerous performances of Sibelius under Stokowski, including, perhaps, the American premieres of the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies in 1926.54 Dur- ing these years, Stokowski frequently programmed Sibelius, whom he re- garded as one of the time's greatest composers, if not the greatest.55 Barber and Sibeliw 185

"Stokowski has always been attracted to brilliant and colourful music," notes Paul Robinson in his 1977 study of the conductor, "and he has a special gift for making an orchestra sing and sound enormously powerful. His performances of the Sibelius symphonies are evidence of this."56 It would be surprising if these performances failed to impress the young Barber.

However, the earliest known indication of a special regard for Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/84/2/175/1209912 by guest on 01 October 2021 Sibelius on Barber's part dates from early 1934- While in Vienna that winter, Barber organized and directed a small string ensemble, rehearsing and performing in his studio on Wednesday afternoons. On 4 January 1934, he gave a concert that included works of Vivaldi and other Italian baroque composers (played from library manuscripts); the world pre- miere of Menotti's just completed Pastorale and Dance for strings and pi- ano (1934); and the purported Austrian premiere of Sibelius's ("The Lover") for strings, triangle, and , a 1912 three-movement tone poem based on an 1894 work of the same name for , male chorus, and strings.57 "The size of the orchestra is against modern mu- sic," Barber explained in a Curtis newsletter, "but I did do a Sibelius pre- miere and a Menotti." Sibelius thus became one of the very few contem- porary composers whose music Barber would ever conduct.58 About a year later, in early 1935, Werner Janssen performed Bar- ber's Music for a Scene from Shelley (1933) in at a concert at- tended by Sibelius. Janssen had invited Barber to travel with him and meet Sibelius ("I should like to meet Sibelius," Barber wrote Scalero), but, as a recent Prix de Rome recipient, he chose to remain in Italy. Janssen's performance of Music/or a Scene apparently piqued the interest of Martti Simila, who conducted it later that year with the Helsinki Mu- nicipal Orchestra; according to local sources, this second performance "aroused much favorable comment in Finnish music circles and probably significantly weakened the prejudice against American musical talent common throughout Europe."59 About the same time, while working on his Symphony in One Movement (begun August 1935 and completed 24 February 1936), Bar- ber analyzed Sibelius's one-movement Seventh Symphony, drafting a one-page chart of the work's primary themes and their development, along with principal key areas.60 This succinct outline (see Fig. 1) ob- served connections among the work's principal themes, in the process obliquely addressing the music's elusive formal design. In 1938, after Toscanini recorded Barber's Adagio for Strings (1936/ 38) and the First (1937), the composer sent Sibelius copies of these recordings with a letter dated 16 December 1938 (see Fig. 2) in which he introduced himself as "twenty-eight years old, 186 The Musical Qwrte~ly Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/84/2/175/1209912 by guest on 01 October 2021

Figure I. Barber's analysis of Sibelius's Symphony no. 7. Reprinted by permission of the Estate of Samuel Barber.

American." "Your music means so much to us who are trying once more to compose," the letter continued, "after the years of post-war experimentation into which we were born-your example as an artist is so beautiful and encouraging: so I have always wanted to meet you, but as this seems impossible, I hope you will forgive my presumption in send- ing these records. With deepest admiration, Sincerely-Sam Barber."61 At about the same time, an RCA press release quoted Sibelius's re- sponse to the two Barber works as follows: "I am glad to say that I con- sider this music excellent. These compositions are good art and espe- cially I like their simplicity. No wonder that Toscanini likes them, too. I am sure there is much success in store for Barber."62 In a 1951 letter to Sibelius requesting a variation on "Happy Birthday to You" as part of a collaborative venture in honor of Mary Curtis Zimbalist, Barber remem- bered Sibelius's "kind words of encouragement in a letter many years ago which I have a!ways treasured," thol~ghwhether he meant the dnc~~menr quoted in the RCA press release or another, more personal letter re- mains unknown.b3 This somewhat meager chronicle of the relationship bettveen Bar- ber and Sihelius takes on greater significance when one considers both Barber and Sibelius 187

men's dismissive attitude toward so many other living composers. Bar- ber's 1938 letter to Sibelius in particular suggests a perspective not un- like that of Gray, Lambert, Walton, and other Anglo-American admirers of the Finn. Indeed, the resemblances between the music of Barber and especially Walton during these years no doubt reflects, at least in part, their shared affection for Sibelius.

Although Barber perhaps never wrote anything as explicitly Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/84/2/175/1209912 by guest on 01 October 2021 Sibelian as, say, Walton's First Symphony (1934), his music itself sug- gests the influence of Sibelius, something occasionally noted by com- mentators, especially with regard to such early works as the , the First Symphony, and the Violin Concerto.64 In a review of the Cello Sonata, Julian Budden even referred to one of the work's melodies as "an unashamed 'Hommage a Sibelius.' "65 In 1949, Barber himself, in speaking of the 1936 world premiere of the First Symphony in Italy, recalled that the Italian public received the work coolly because "at the time it was thought too dark-toned, too Nordic and Sibelian."66 Significantly, such leading Sibelius advocates as Janssen, Ormandy, Rod- zinski, and Koussevitzky (though not Stokowski) quickly became associ- ated with Barber's music. The forementioned introduction to the early Serenade already re- veals at least a kinship with Sibelius in its somewhat lugubrious tone, its smooth, stepwise voice leading, its rhythmic pliancy, and its piquant chromatic and modal ambiguities resolved by a conventional harmonic cadence. But Barber's works from the ensuing decade—including the songs Dover Beach (1931), "Bessie Bobtail" (1934), "I Hear an Army" (1936), "A Nun Takes the Veil" (1937), "The Secrets of the Old" (1938), and "Sure on This Shining Night" (1938); the Cello Sonata (1932); the String Quartet (1936), whose slow movement, as arranged for , became the celebrated Adagio for Strings (1938); and, for orchestra, The School for Scandal (1931), the First Symphony (1936), the First Essay (1937), and the Violin Concerto (1939)—more decidedly suggest the influence of Sibelius. Above all, these works reveal many textural and coloristic details associated with Sibelius: soft timpani pedals, string tremolos, crescendo- ing horns, the slow amassing of full chords, the cascading sheets of sound, in short, all those orchestral effects aimed at minimizing what Sibelius called "holes."67 Comparative study also reveals similar kinds of rocking violin figuration in Barber's Dover Beach and much Sibelius, including the Fourth Symphony; simultaneous contrary motion of modal scales in Barber's School for Scandal and related gestures in Sibelius's Third and Seventh Symphonies; melodies juxtaposed with their own augmentation or diminution, a distinctive feature of both Barber's First 188 The Musical Quarterly

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Figure 2. Letter from Barber to Sibelius. Barber and Sibelius 189

EIGHT EAST SEVENTY-NINTH STREET

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Figure 2. continued

Symphony and Sibelius's Tapiola; and, especially in passages for string and brass , close voice crossings, as in the trumpet trio that con- cludes Barber's First Essay and the brass climax in the central adagio of Sibelius's Seventh Symphony. Sibelius generally appears to have been a model for the rich tex- tures, including thirds and simple triads in unusual ranges, of Barber's early music, as in the Andante tranquillo from the First Symphony, with its triads played by the strings divided into eleven parts accompanied by rolled chords in the harp. More specifically Sibelian are those dense tex- tures at registral extremes, for example, the rather muddy opening of the Cello Sonata's slow movement and the stratospheric climax of the Ada- gio. The latter work can be profitably compared—for texture especially, but also for color and harmony—both to the concluding measures of Sibelius's Sixth Symphony (Ex. 2) and to the divisi string section around B in the Seventh Symphony (Ex. 3). 190 The Musical @arterly

Motto adaein Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/84/2/175/1209912 by guest on 01 October 2021

Example 2a. Samuel Barber, Adagio for Strings, mm. 6 before rehearsal 5-5 (New York: G. Schirmer, 1939). Copyright O 1939 (Renewed) G.Schirmer, Inc. (ASCAP). International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by Permission.

Barber's melodic language seems more decidedly his own. From the start, he composed sweet, lilting melodies that make the dignified later Sibelius seem appropriately grandfatherly in comparison. And yet one finds a shared penchant for sighing gestures, especially a three-note mo- tive, often resembling the traditional CchappCe, in which a long note rises the interval of a second and then falls a third, a fourth, or a fifth (or the same idea inverted), an idea sometimes elaborated by a turn or some other ixnament. Thc number of Barber works from the 19305 pmpelled by this sort of "germ" (as Sibelius scholarship has it) is extraordinary, in- cluding many of the op. 10 and op. 13 songs and nearly all of the orches- tral works. Such motives similarly generate a number of Sibelius's sym- phonies and tune poems, as well as his Violin Concerto and Rakastava, Barber and Sibeliw 19 1 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/84/2/175/1209912 by guest on 01 October 2021

Example 2a. continued

the piece Barber conducted in Vienna. Especially when cast in a minor mode, these sighing gestures help give both Sibelius and Barber their recognizably brooding quality (Ex. 4). Another similarity involves the coloring of basically diatonic mate- rials with shadings reminiscent of the old church modes. The kinds of dorian, phrygian, and lydian inflections found in, for example, Barber's First Symphony, "I Hear an Army," and "The Secrets of the Old," re- spectively, recall Sibelius's twentieth-century scores. Barber's use of modality, however, tends to be more structurally decisive, as exemplified by the phrygian Adagio, an F-centered work with a key signature of five flats. In this sense, Barber can be seen as intensifying the sort of modal writing found in late Sibelius. 192 The Musical Quarterly Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/84/2/175/1209912 by guest on 01 October 2021

Example 2b. Jean Sibelius, Symphony no. 6,1V, mm. 7 after rehearsal P to 12 mm. after rehearsal P (Copenhagen: Wilhelm Hansen, 1925). Edited and revised by Julia A. Burt, New York, 1946. Copy- right O 1936 by Edition Wilhelm Hansen A/S, Copenhagen. Reprinted by permission.

Exampk 3i1 Samuel Rarher. Adagio for Strings, m. 1 after rehearsal 1-3 mrn. before rehearsal 2 (New York: G. Schirrncr. 1939). Copyrighr 0 1939 (Renewed) G. Schirmer, Inc. (ASCAP). International Copyriahr Sccured. All Rights Resemed. Reprinted by Permission. Barber and Sibeliw 193 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/84/2/175/1209912 by guest on 01 October 2021 I ,, , - r* i1::" f --- I -. pof" 0 PO' 0 I"'"" p

I / u- 1 i-i! * = i- u-

'I I-. \I -- I I

w------..---i - , I I - .r4 . - (1 . - -- -. I ---I- L.. 1 .-- - - -.

Exampk 3b. Jean Sibelius, Symphony no. 7, rehearsal El0mm. after rehearsal B (Copenhagen: Wilhelrn Hansen, 1925). Copyright O 1924 by Edition Wilhelm Hansen A/S, Copenhagen. Reprinted by permission.

As with Sibelius, Barber's harmonic language also inclines toward basic chords that move in weak and nonfunctional progressions, with dissonances heard in clear triadic contexts. Even the striking opening measures of School for Scandal, with its juxtaposition of D-major and E- flat-minor triads, basically decorate, 3 la Strauss, the music's tonal center, D. A more typical strategy, and one characteristic of Sibelius as well, in- volves establishing a tonal center without recourse to the dominant; the antecedent-consequent phrase that opens Barber's Cello Sonata (one that moves suddenly from C to F-sharp), for example, recalls analogous modulations in the exposition movements of Sibelius's Third and Fourth Symphonies. Another harmonic similarity involves long periods of tonal stasis followed by chromatic, sequential patterns, as in Barber's First Essay and the first movement of~ibeliu2sFifth Symphony. As for rhythm, both Sibelius and at least the early Barber share a predilection for unchanging meters that are either compound (such as 46, 49, and i2)or that take the half note as their hasic heat (for instance, 194 The Mwical Quartedy

Allegro ma non troppo .= 66 n!o/!oinrcwmrnrr - > 2 + m E S r= A

Samuel Barber, Symphony no. 1, first movement, m. 2 (New York: G. Schirmer, 1943) Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/84/2/175/1209912 by guest on 01 October 2021 Copyright O 1943 (Renewed) G. Schirmer, Inc. (ASCAP). International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by Permission.

Andante sostenuto

Samuel Barber, Essay no. 1, mm. 1-4 (New York: G. Schirmer, 1941). Copyright O 1941 (Renewed) G. Schirmer, Inc. (ASCAP). International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by Permission.

Jean Sibelius, Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, first movement, mm. 4-8 (New York: Eulenberg, 1933). Copyright O 1933 Paul Juon, Berlin. Copyright Renewed. This Edi- tion licensed to Emst Eulenberg Ltd. by original Publisher, Robert Lienau, Berlin. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission of European American Music Distributors, LLC, Sole U.S. and Canadian Agent for Emst Eulenberg Ltd.

Jean Sibelius, Rakastava for String Orchestra, first movement, rnm. 2-6 (London: British and Continental Music Agencies. 1913). Copyright by Warner Chappel Music Findland OY. Reprinted by permission of Boosey and Hawkes, inc., U.S. Agent. Barber and Sibelius 195

and |). Furthermore, their tendency to fill these large measures with rests, fermatas, and irregular divisions often results in a similarly elusive sense of downbeat. Rather, both composers frequently give the impres- sion of a spacious, unmetered flow, a feature of their music as novel in its own way as the modal-chromatic melodies and the nonfunctional progressions. Perhaps Barber never came closer to Sibelius than in his one- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/84/2/175/1209912 by guest on 01 October 2021 movement First Symphony (1935-36); given his 1935 analysis of Sibelius's Seventh Symphony (1924), also in one movement, the work apparently represents an intentional response to that particular piece. At the very least, Barber borrowed from Sibelius the idea of a one- movement symphony, still very much a novelty in those years. Barber even subtitled his symphony, as had Sibelius, "in one movement." But the two symphonies reveal more specific resemblances as well. Gauging the relationship of these two works, however, is compli- cated by the fact that in 1942-43 Barber revised his symphony, "con- densing and tightening" the whole, according to Barbara Heyman, and totally rewriting and significantly expanding the scherzo section. Be- cause only about fifteen measures of the 1936 scherzo survive, it is hard to say whether the original symphony may have more closely resembled Sibelius's Seventh than does this extant version. Certainly, the new scherzo contains that sharper, more dissonant edge (including a violent outburst at its climax) characteristic of Barber's post-1940 work. More- over, considering that the original scherzo section was considerably shorter and that its main theme was more clearly derived from previ- ously stated material, the original symphony as a whole probably felt less sectional, more through-composed, and, in this sense at least, more like the Sibelius Seventh. Olin Downes specifically commented on the greater contrast provided by the later version. Still, the revision retained enough of the work's basic structure that Barber's fairly detailed precis of the symphony, as put forth on the occasion of its 1937 New York pre- miere, faithfully describes the revised version as well.68 The form of Sibelius's Seventh Symphony has elicited diverse in- terpretations from critics, but with an eye to assessing its relationship to the Barber symphony, one can outline it as follows: an adagio "exposi- tion" (as Barber himself refers to it in his analysis of the work) in that states all the work's principal melodic material; a pochett. meno adagio "development" (again Barber's term); a vivacissimo "scherzo section" (once more, Barber's description) that begins, accord- ing to Barber, with the ^ time signature; a central adagio section that recasts a climactic theme from the exposition into C minor; and, in the original key of C major, an allegro finale whose coda leads to an adagio 196 The Musical Quarterly

that restates the climactic theme more or less as found in the exposition. Although some commentators regard the Seventh as more of a tone poem than anything else, its adagio, vivacissimo, adagio, and allegro sec- tions roughly correspond to the first, scherzo, slow, and final movements of a traditional symphony, with the final adagio serving as both the reca- pitulation of the opening adagio and the coda for the entire work. Con-

sequently, the Seventh can be viewed as both an expansion of sonata Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/84/2/175/1209912 by guest on 01 October 2021 form and a condensation of the multi-movement symphony. Barber's symphony works along similar lines. It puts forth a rather slow allegro ma non troppo (quarter note = 66) exposition that contains all of the work's principal themes; a slightly faster (piu animato) devel- opment; an allegro molto scherzo section; an andante tranquillo section; and a con moto finale with a coda (beginning with the largamente) that recalls the opening exposition. Accordingly, like the Sibelius Seventh, Barber's symphony arguably encompasses both and a four- movement format, one difference being that it perhaps makes more sense to consider Barber's entire con moto finale, as opposed to just its coda, as the work's recapitulation. At the same time, Barber's symphony is formally less cryptic than Sibelius's. The work's opening section, for example, resembles a tradi- tional sonata exposition, complete with a dramatic first theme in the tonic (E minor) followed by a lyrical second theme, transitional theme, and closing theme, all largely cast in a modally ambiguous dominant mi- nor (B minor). In contrast, Sibelius's exposition presents a series of in- terrelated themes (Barber's chart lists eight separate ideas) that continu- ally grow in and out of one another and that for long stretches maintain the same tonal center. Moreover, Barber retains the conflict established between the first and second themes in the course of the symphony by deriving the scherzo section essentially from the first theme and the slow movement from the second theme. Yet he minimizes the contrast of the second theme by stating it a mere twenty-nine measures into the movement and by retaining certain melodic shapes reminiscent of the first theme. As a result, the second theme sounds somewhat like a Sibelian outgrowth of what came before. Barber's finale similarly contains features both reminiscent of and distinct from Sibelius. Its use of passacaglia form, for instance, strikes a rather un-Sibelian note, notwithstanding the passacagiia-iike aspects of the Fifth Symphony's finale, Tapiola, or, more tenuously, the presto sec- tion at the conclusion of the Seventh (in which the opening scalar theme, augmented, is repeated three times). Rather, Barber's passacaglia- finale more decidedly recalls Brahms's Fourth Symphony. Such classical Barber and Sibelius 197 resonances—found not only in Barber, but also in Hanson, Walton, and other neoromantics of the 1930s—mark a notable difference between Sibelius and those younger symphonists who more or less followed in his footsteps. Barber's relatively conventional forms in general contain a lu- cidity and accessibility lacking in Sibelius, although at the expense of the kind of originality achieved by the latter. At the same time, Barber's passacaglia-finale reveals many melodic Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/84/2/175/1209912 by guest on 01 October 2021 and orchestral details, not to mention its darkly solemn mood, that sug- gest the influence of, in particular, the Seventh's final adagio section. Moreover, Barber juxtaposes the passacaglia bass (an augmented version of the first theme's opening phrase) with other motives from the first theme as well as with the second theme (at least as developed in the an- dante tranquillo), the transitional theme, and the closing theme. Such thematic denseness relates the work to Sibelius as well. In short, the First Symphony shows Barber accommodating Sibelius's style, formal methods, and aesthetic to his own temperament as well as to his own times. Aside from Sibelius's prominence in the 1920s and 1930s as a lead- ing representative of conservative modernism (or what James Hepokoski calls the "liberal bourgeois 'modernist' tradition" as opposed to the "radi- cal 'New Music' "69), explanations for Barber's attraction to the Finnish composer remain a matter of speculation. Sibelius's closeness to Brahms —the fact that he reportedly considered "the ever-increasing glory of Brahms ... of far-reaching moral significance"70—and his adaptation of the Brahms legacy to a post-Debussy milieu no doubt recommended itself especially to someone as enamored of Brahms as was Barber. Relatedly, Sibelius and Barber shared a deep attachment to baroque and Renaissance music. Thoroughly grounded in early music through his work with Scalero, Barber pursued such interests under the guidance of the musicologists Karl Geiringer in Vienna and Giacomo Benvenuti in Milan in early 1934, just at that time when he performed Rakastava. "I was studying a great deal of old Italian music which we should know better," he wrote to friends at Curtis, ". . . for in the Italian primitives . . . there is much which our too-complicated contemporary composers might learn." He also purchased a "spinet" (that is, presumably, a single- keyboard harpsichord), which he brought back to the United States with him. As he made some motion toward a singing career during these years, he considered programming Caccini and other "primitives" on song recitals, accompanying himself at the harpsichord in arrangements of his own devising. "Do you think I am completely cracked?" he asked Scalero, adding, "Why should someone not resurrect these marvelous things for the voice as Landowska did for cembalo music?"71 198 The Musical Quarterly

Knowing all this, one can hardly hear Barber's Gerard Manley Hopkins setting, "A Nun Takes the Veil" (1937), and not think of the composer singing Caccini at the harpsichord. But as with late Sibelius, early music seems to have informed his style quite generally. Kenneth Nott, who has pioneered such investigation, makes an illuminating case for the influence in particular of Monteverdi's Combattimento di Tancredi

e Clorinda and Purcell's fantasias on, respectively, "Bessie Bobtail" and Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/84/2/175/1209912 by guest on 01 October 2021 the Adagio.72 Such connections became almost inescapable when Barber arranged his Adagio as for a cappella chorus (1967). A number of the aforementioned traits said to characterize both Barber and Sibelius—the modal harmonies, the lyrical polyphony, the rhythmic plasticity, the simultaneous contrary motion, the voice cross- ings, and the close textures—may well derive more from their shared closeness to early music than from the influence of Sibelius per se. And yet Sibelius may have served Barber as a model for the assimilation of early music in a contemporary context. Certainly Barber's highly roman- tic use of such materials distinguished his music from that of more aus- tere neoclassicists, including not only Stravinsky, but also Casella and Malipiero, whose work he knew during his time in Italy in the 1930s. Rather, his neoclassicism seemed more the product of his training with Scalero, if we can judge from such Curtis colleagues as Gian Carlo Menotti (Amahl and the Night Visitors) and Nino Rota (Romeo and Juliet), or even from such later Scalero students as George Rochberg. In any case, Barber's receptivity to Sibelius and early music were by no means unrelated. Only two other possible factors bearing on Barber's affiliation with Sibelius need detain us here. First, Sibelius epitomized the composer alone or at one with nature (Wilfrid Mellers writes of his "Delian desire to relinquish his personality in nature"73), aloof from what Robert Lay- ton calls "the urbanization of music."74 Barber was of a similar stripe. "Skyscrapers, subways, and train lights play no part in the music I write," he asserted in 1935.75 Like Sibelius, Barber disliked cities, preferring to work, in the 1930s, in the European countryside or at his family's cottage in the Poconos; then, from 1943 to 1962, at Capricorn, the fifty-three- acre home he shared with Menotti in the Hudson River Valley; and finally, after 1962, at his villa in Santa Cristina, Italy. "I wish you could look out the window of my studio and see the hemlock woods all cov- ered with snow!" he wrote to Sidney Homer in 1943. "Who would ever want to live in New York again!"76 And in 1979 he stated, "I think I'm a country person. Most everything I've composed, I've composed in the country, and the pieces I've written in the city have generally been started in the country ... I like birds. And I need the absolute silence of Barber and Sibelius 199 the country. I need places to walk."77 Sibelius naturally appealed to com- posers like Barber who harbored some aversion toward modern cities. From the start of his career, with Dover Beach, Barber certainly revealed himself to be a somewhat old-fashioned—and highly gifted— nature composer. And if his First Symphony fell less squarely in the tra- dition of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony and the Liszt tone poems than did the Sibelius symphonies, the work nonetheless displayed many of the Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/84/2/175/1209912 by guest on 01 October 2021 earmarks of romantic nature painting, from its windswept outer sections to its pastoral andante tranquillo, complete with plaintive oboe, plucked harp, and undulating strings. Finally, Sibelius and Barber had similar temperaments: widely de- scribed as cool, even icy personalities, they both suffered from depression and alcoholism. Menotti frankly described Barber as "a very tormented soul."78 The deeply melancholic strain in Sibelius's music, along with its corollary, a rather mordant humor, seems to have found a responsive echo in Barber's work. Ultimately, however, the differences between Barber and Sibelius may well be more instructive than their similarities. Although Sibelius might have vaguely served Barber, for example, as a model for reconcil- ing the competing demands of nationalism and the great European tradi- tion, the former's folkloric and rustic qualities found little resonance in his work. On the contrary, Barber quickly gained the reputation as a par- ticularly polished and urbane composer, notwithstanding a certain di- rectness and candor that struck some listeners as characteristically American. In distinction to Sibelius's seemingly endless fascination with his nation's mythic folk epic, , Barber's basic affinity was with the cultivated Anglo-Irish romantic poetic tradition from Shelley through Yeats. Relatedly, Barber remained fundamentally a composer of personal sentiment and reflection, less portentous than Sibelius, more immediate in his emotional appeal. Wilfrid Mellers's description of 's Dover Beach—"that cry of the young heart, lonely in a hostile world"—could be said to characterize not only Barber's setting of the poem, but the bulk of his work, which, for all its coolness and refine- ment, could be rather melodramatic and sentimental.79 In this sense, Barber, at least in his earlier years, was arguably more romantic than Sibelius and the other transitional figures he so esteemed. For the young Barber, Sibelius seems to have been not so much a springboard to the future as a link to the past.

Listeners have long agreed that Barber's music matured in the course of World War II, becoming more distinctively chromatic and angular in 200 The Musical Quarterly

the process. Contemporaries observed this change as early as the pre- mieres of the 1942 Second Essay (whose epilogue actually resembles the Adagio) and, even more, the 1944 Capricorn Concerto.80 By the time of the 1949 , Barber had begun to displease old friends such as Scalero and win new ones like Copland.81 The principal Barber experts—including Broder, Friedewald, and

Heyman—all cite, as a turning point, the finale to the Violin Concerto Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/84/2/175/1209912 by guest on 01 October 2021 (1939).82 That Barber completed this movement just after the outbreak of World War II, which had him hastily scuttling home from Europe, was telling. Broder makes the connection explicitly:

Shut off though he had been, by upbringing and inclination and fate from the political and economic forces that swept the nations along into war, the cataclysm that engulfed the world could not fail to affect the life of Samuel Barber . . . there was a deepening of character, a greater sense of responsibility to others—a new maturity nourished not only by the events of the outer world but by the onset of his father's lingering, grave, and eventually fatal illness. This growth ... is clearly reflected in his music.

Indeed, Barber immediately responded to world events with a choral set- ting of Stephen Spender's war poem, A Stopwatch and an Ordnance Map (1940), a work that can be said to initiate the second phase of his career. Barber's subsequent development requires at least some qualifica- tion of nearly all the generalizations about him posited earlier in this es- say. He began incorporating aspects of Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Bartok, and jazz; he partook of the "urbanization of music" in, say, his reflection on modern warfare in the Second Symphony (1944), with its explosive writing for percussion and its use of an electronic instrument; and he showed greater involvement in American literature and the American scene, as evident in (1944), Knoxville: Summer of 1915 (1948), and (1959), a sardonic exploration of suburban not unlike 's Trouble in Tahiti. At the same time, Barber's later work represented an enlargement, not a rejection, of long-standing ideals and habits. The sighing melodies, the unmetrical rhythms, the modal harmonies, the lush textures, the ul- traorganic forms, the pastoral elements, and the dark emotions, as dis- cussed above, could be found, in modified fashion, in the music after 1940. Moreover, Barber remained attuned to traditional English and Irish verse. Following a 1950 trip to Copenhagen in which he found the locals "very congenial,"83 he gravitated toward Danish culture as well: in , for chorus and orchestra (1954), and in his opera Vanessa (1957), to a libretto by Menotti inspired by the work of Isak Dinesen. Commentators struck by the seeming peculiarity of Barber and Sibelius 201

Vanessa's apparently Scandinavian setting—specified as a "country house in a northern country, the year about 1905"—and its connections to Strindberg and Ibsen might find it helpful to consider Barber's youthful closeness to Sibelius.84 Barber's growth helped maintain his reputation and stature as the most viable and best-known of those American romantics who rallied around Sibelius in the 1930s. As such, his work anticipated and to vary- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/84/2/175/1209912 by guest on 01 October 2021 ing degrees influenced a wide range of American compositions, includ- ing the work of a younger generation of "new romantics" active later in the twentieth century. But if Barber helped shape an American romantic tradition, then Sibelius at least merits some recognition as one of its European progenitors.

Notes My thanks to Barbara Heyman, Kent Kennan, Tim Koozin, and James Hepokoski for their suggestions regarding this essay, which is dedicated, in appreciation, to Barbara Heyman and Glenda Dawn Goss. 1. Nathan Broder, Samuel Barber (New York: G. Schirmer, 1956); Russell Edward Friedewald, "A Formal and Stylistic Analysis of the Published Music of Samuel Barber" (Ph.D. diss., Iowa State University, 1957); Wilfrid Metiers, Music in a New Found Land: Themes and Developments in the History of American Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 195-203; and Barbara B. Heyman, Samuel Barber: The Composer and His Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). Virgil Thomson was unusual in ob- jecting to the term "neoromantic" as applied to Barber, thinking him, rather, an "acade- mic" of "the gentle sweet-singing sort," comparable to Edward MacDowell. Thomson argued thus partly because he considered neoromanticism a distinctly French phenome- non associated especially with the work of Henri Sauguet. However, considering Barber's association with both Poulenc and Sauguet—as evidenced by his close friendship with Poulenc as well as by a 1953 song recital in which he accompanied in his own songs along with those by Poulenc and Sauguet—Thomson's line of thinking can actually be used to support the notion of Barber as a neoromantic. See Heyman, Samuel Barber: The Composer and His Music, 196, 340. 2. Heyman, Samuel Barber: The Composer and His Music, 379. 3. Heyman, Samuel Barber: The Composer and His Music, 130. 4. Heyman, Samuel Barber: The Composer and His Music, 42, 56, 57. 5. Heyman, Samuel Barber: The Composer and His Music, 331. 6. Heyman, Samuel Barber: The Composer and His Music, 60. 7. Sidney Homer, My Wife and I: The Story of Louise and Sidney Homer (New York: Macmillan, 1939), 33-37, 47. 8. Samuel Barber, preface, Seventeen Songs by Sidney Homer, compiled by Samuel Bar- ber (New York: G. Schirmer, 1943). 9. Broder, Samuel Barber, 16. 10. John Gruen, Menotti: A Biography (New York: Macmillan, 1978), 22. 202 The Musical Quarterly

11. Heyman, Samuel Barber: The Composer and His Music, 57. 12. Heyman, Samuel Barber: The Composer and His Music, 171. 13. Broder, Samuel Barber, 73; Friedewald, "A Formal and Stylistic Analysis," 157. 14. Heyman, Samuel Barber: The Composer and His Music, 64. 15. These included Theodore Thomas and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (1891-

1904), Walter Damrosch and the New York Symphony (1902-28), and the Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/84/2/175/1209912 by guest on 01 October 2021 Boston Symphony Orchestra (1906-08, 1912-18), Leopold Stokowski and the Philadel- phia Orchestra (1912-34), Serge Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra (1924-49), and the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra (1931-36), and Sir and the New York Philharmonic (1937-42). 16. Karl Ekman, Jean Sibelius: His Life and Personality, trans. Edward Birse (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1938), 215-16, 274. 17. See Robert Layton, Sibelius and His World (New York: Viking Press, 1970), 57-59, 227; Glenda Dawn Goss, Jean Sibelius and Olin Dowries: Music, Friendship, Criticism (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1995), 81-101; Harold E. Johnson, Jean Sibelius (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1959), 208-10; and Oliver Daniel, Stokowski: A Counter- point of View (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1982), 586-87, 609, 1028. 18. Goss, Jean Sibelius and Olin Doumes, 169. 19. Consider, for example, Downes's 1929 letter to Sibelius (addressed "Dear Friend and Great Master, whom 1 love and adore"), which concludes, "You have made me proud to live, as 1 shall be proud to die. Of all the things God has given me, there is nothing more precious, more happy, than Sibelius." For more on this relationship, see Goss as well as this author's review of Jean Sibelius and Olin Downes in the Sonneck Society Newsletter 22, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 26-27. 20. Laura Gray, "Sibelius and England," in The Sibelius Companion, ed. Glenda Dawn Goss (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996), 281-87; Constant Lambert, Music Ho! A Study of Music in Decline (London: Faber and Faber, 1934); Cecil Gray, Sibelius (Lon- don: Oxford University Press, 1931); Ekman, Jean Sibelius: His Life and Personality; Bengt de Torne, Sibelius: A Close-Up (London: Faber and Faber, 1937); Rosa Newmarch, Jean Sibelius (London: Goodwin and Tabb, 1939); Ernest Newman, More Essays from the World of Music, vol. 2 (London: John Calder, 1958), 113-28; and Donald Francis Tovey, Essays in Musical Analysis, vol. 2 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1935), 121-29. 21. C. Gray, Sibelius, 187; Lambert, Music Ho.', 312. 22. Tovey, Essays m Musical Analysis,121. 23. Newman, More Essays from the World of Music, 118, 128. 24- Johnson, Jean Sibelius, 207; see also Marion Bauer's discussion of Sibelius in Twenti- eth Century Music: How It Developed and How To Listen To It (New York: S. P. Putnam's Sons, 1933), 187-99. 25. Lambert, Music Ho!, 327-28. 26. C. Gray, Sibelius, 197-204; see also Torne, Sibelius: A Close-Up, 79. 27. L. Gray, "Sibelius and England," 28. 28. Philip Coad, "Sibelius," in A Guide to the Symphony, ed. Robert Layton (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 35. Barber and Sibelius 203

29. C. Gray, Sibelius, 11. 30. James Hepokoski, Sibe/ius: Symphony No. 5 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 12, 15. 31. , "Sibelius and Wagner," in The Sibelius Companion, ed. Glenda Dawn Goss (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996), 64-65. 32. Hepokoski, Sibelius: Symphony No. 5, 17. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/84/2/175/1209912 by guest on 01 October 2021 33. Ruth T. Watanabe, "Howard Hanson," in New Grove Dictionary of American Music, 4 vols. ed. H. Wiley Hitchcock and (New York: Grove's Dictionaries of Music, 1986), 2:321. Writes Watanabe, "A neoromantic composer, Hanson cited Sibelius and Grieg as powerful influences on his lyrical and harmonic style." 34. Peter Dickinson, "Twentieth-Century Music: American Orchestral," Musical Times 1477 (Mar. 1966): 239. Discussing Harris's symphonies with George Antheil in the 1930s, remarked, "It often sounds like Sibelius to me, at least in con- struction . . . quite too much in fact." George Antheil, Bad Boy of Music (1945; reprint, New York: Da Capo Press, 1981), 324. 35. Michael Kennedy, The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams (London: Oxford Univer- sity Press, 1964), 262, 333, 381. 36. Susana Walton, William Walton: Behind the Fagade (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 77. 37. Michael Kennedy, Portrait of Walton (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 83, 285. 38. Glenda Dawn Goss, "Interlude V: A Composer and His Reputation," in The Sibelius Companion, ed. Glenda Dawn Goss (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996), 276. 39. C. Gray, Sibelius, 24-27. 40. Elliott Arnold, : The Story of Sibelius (1941; reprint, New York: Henry Holt, 1950), 10-21; Goss, Jean Sibelius and Olin Dowries, 116. 41. Layton, Sibelius and His World, 72. 42. Johnson, jean Sibelius, 203. 43. Johnson, jean Sibelius, 213. 44. Arnold, for instance, wrote in 1941, "Tossed back and forth like a cork on the mighty tidal waves of the Second World War, Finland found itself a co-belligerent of Nazi Germany as the war progressed, although there was no nation in Europe whose peo- ple were instinctively more opposed to the hateful intolerances of Hitler's state than were the common people of Finland" {Finlandia, 21). 45. Goss, Jean Sibelius and Olin Downes, 126. 46. , Sibelius: A Personal Portrait (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1972), 115. 47. Erik Levi, Music in the Third Reich (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994), 155, 218, 245. 48. Goss, jean Sibelius and Olin Downes, 129. 49. Goss, Jean Sibelius and Olin Downes, 124. 204 The Musical Quarterly

50. Harlow Robinson, Serge Prokofiev: A Biography (New York: Viking, 1987); and Humphrey Carpenter, (London: Faber and Faber, 1992). 51. Johnson, Jean Sibelius,223. 52. Aaron Copland, Our New Music (New York: McGraw Hill, 1941), 45. 53. In the 1980s and 1990s, such notable American composers as Easley Blackwood, John Adams, and Christopher Rouse took inspiration from Sibelius. On the critical front, see, e.g., Carl Dahlhaus's appraisal in Nineteenth-Century Music (Berkeley: Univer- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/84/2/175/1209912 by guest on 01 October 2021 sity of California Press, 1989): "Composers such as Jean Sibelius and doubtless belonged to the modernists, as they were understood at the time, yet hesitated to take the final step to contemporary music. For critics incapable of making aesthetic judgments without first establishing a figure's historical 'import,' these composers fell into an aesthetic no-man's land by failing to conform to historiographical formulae" (367). 54. Heyman reports that Curtis composers were given Friday afternoons off specifically in order to attend orchestra concerts (Samuel Barber: The Composer and His Music, 36). 55. Daniel, Stokouiski, 237, 586; and Goss, Jean Sibelius and Oiin Dowries, 85. 56. Paul Robinson, Stokowski (Canada: Lester and Orpen, 1977), 110. 57. Broder, Samuel Barber, 26; Heyman, Samuel Barber: The Composer and His Music, 102; and John Ardoin, The Stages ofMenotti (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1985), 235. 58. Heyman, Samuel Barber: The Composer and His Music, 102. 59. Heyman, Samuel Barber: The Composer and His Music, 130. 60. Reprinted in Heyman, Samuel Barber: The Composer and His Music, 141. 61. Samuel Barber to Jean Sibelius, 16 Dec. 1938, Helsinki University Library. 62. RCA press release, Barber clipping file, Music Division, New York Public Library. The release does not give the source of Sibelius's remarks. Moreover, it inexplicably dates the statement 15 Mar. 1938, that is, nine months before Barber wrote Sibelius his intro- ductory letter. 63. Samuel Barber to Jean Sibelius, 12 June 1951, Helsinki University Library. 64. Don A. Hennessee, Samuel Barber: A Bio-Bibliography (Westport, Conn.: Green- wood Press, 1985), B66o, B79u, B90d; Heyman, Samuel Barber: The Composer and His Music, 115, 143; and John Canarina, "The American Symphony," in A Guide to the Symphony, 419. 65. Hennessee, Samuel Barber: A Bio-Bibliography, B90d. 66. Heyman, Samuel Barber: The Composer and His Music, 143. 67. Torne, Sibelius: A Close-Up, 31. 68. Heyman, Samuel Barber: The Composer and His Music, 140-47. 69. Hepokoski, Sibelius: Symphony No. 5, x. 70. Veijo Murtomaki, " 'Symphonic Fantasy': A Synthesis of Symphonic Thinking in Sibelius's Seventh Symphony and Tapiola," in The Sibelius Companion, ed. Glenda Dawn Goss (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996), 149. 71. Heyman, Samuel Barber: The Composer and His Music, 102-3. Barber and Sibelius 205

72. Kenneth Nott, " 'Italian Primitives' and the Formation of Samuel Barber's Early Style," unpublished paper delivered at a meeting of the Society for SeventeendvCentury Music (30 Apr. 1994), courtesy of Kenneth Nott and Barbara Heyman. 73. Wilfrid Mellers, Romanticism and the Twentieth Century (Fair Lawn, N.J.: Essential Books, 1957), 133. 74- Layton, Sibelius and His World, 4.

75. Heyman, Samuel Barber: The Composer and His Music, 130. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/84/2/175/1209912 by guest on 01 October 2021 76. Heyman, Samuel Barber: The Composer and His Music, 218. 77. Heyman, Samuel Barber: The Composer and His Music, 241. 78. Heyman, Samite/ Barber: The Composer and His Music, 461. 79. Mellers, Music in a New Found Land, 195. 80. Heyman, Samuel Barber: The Composer and His Music, 209, 242-43. 81. Heyman, Samuel Barber: The Composer and His Music, 310; and Howard Pollack, Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man (New York: Henry Holt, 1999), 192. 82. Broder, Samuel Barber, 35; Friedewald, "A Formal and Stylistic Analysis," 335-36; and Heyman, Samue! Barber: The Composer and His Music, 197. 83. Broder, Samuel Barber, 39. 84- Heyman, Samuel Barber: The Composer and His Music, 396.