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

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 composer 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, Vanessa (1957) and Antony and Cleopatra (1966), or the more impassioned of his love songs. Gian Carlo Menotti, 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 libretto 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 Romantic music and poetry. In the years just prior to those two 1931 works—Dover Beach and the overture 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 Vienna, where Barber and Menotti took rooms on the city's Brahmsplatz. In that same year, Barber performed Brahms's cello sonatas with a Curtis Institute friend en route to Europe and some of Brahms's piano 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 Serenade for String Quartet, op. 1 (1928) and his setting of A. E. Housman's "With Rue My Heart Is Laden" (1928), but also a violin sonata (1928) and a piano concerto (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 composers. "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 Horatio Parker, 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 James Stephens (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 himself 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 George Antheil, 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, Berlin, or New York. When Toscanini championed Barber's Adagio for Strings and First Essay in 1938, tensions between Barber and his more progressive colleagues led to a sharply worded debate in the New York Times, 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 conservatism—and, for an eighteen-year-old, its remarkable suavity—apparently 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 Hugo Wolf'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 A minor to E minor 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 language 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.

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