Reflections of Samuel Barber at Curtis and Beyond
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Reflections of Samuel Barber at Curtis and beyond Barber in his student days, ca. 1932 ‘I WAS MEANT TO BE PHOTO: CURTIS ARCHIVES A COMPOSER, AND WILL BE I’M SURE.’ BY DR. BARBARA B. HEYMAN In celebration of the centenary of composer and alumnus Samuel Barber, musicologist and Barber biographer Dr. Barbara B. Heyman shares with Overtones reflections of his Curtis days and its influence on his career. She draws on his letters, his diaries, and interviews with artists for whom he wrote music. “Many of his Curtis classmates,” she writes, “generously shared with me treasured memories, manuscripts of early works that they performed, and letters that they saved because they just ‘knew he was going to be famous.’” Samuel Osmond Barber II was born on March 9, 1910, in West Chester, Pennsylvania. His father, Roy Barber, was a physician; his mother, Marguerite (“Daisy”), was an amateur pianist. Early on, Sam Barber expressed his creativity primarily through song. In his words, “writing songs just seemed a natural thing to do.” And the one thing he knew for certain was that he wanted to be a composer, an ambition he declared in a now-infamous letter he wrote at eight: Dear Mother: I have written this to tell you my worrying secret. Now don’t cry when you read it because it is neither yours nor my fault. I suppose I will have to tell you now without any nonsense. To begin with, I was not meant to be an athlet [sic]. I was meant to be a composer, and will be I’m sure. OVERTONES SPRING 2010 7 Many years later, at the height of his career, reflecting on his parents’ ambitions for him, Barber recalled: I was supposed to be a doctor. I was supposed to go to Princeton. And every- thing I was supposed to do, I didn’t. But I was very lucky because the Curtis Institute opened its doors in 1924, when I was fourteen, and Mrs. Bok started that extraordinary school and it was just thirty miles from my house. … I had wonderful teachers. When the doors of the Curtis Institute of Music opened for the first time on October 1, 1924, Barber was the second to enter. Photographs show him to be lanky and serious, hair parted in the middle, with handsome features hidden behind large spectacles. He soon distinguished himself as a pianist, a composer, and a singer. In the fall of 1926, he began composition studies with Rosario Scalero and piano with Isabelle Vengerova. But his interest in singing was so strong he auditioned for Emilio de Gogorza and appealed to the head of Curtis to be allowed to take a triple major, the first student to do so at the Institute. He completed his studies in 1933. The rigorous training Scalero dispensed in counterpoint and the experience writing for all genres and forms left an indelible mark on Barber. Beginning with music of the sixteenth century, he worked on counterpoint, fugue, and motets before studying eighteenth- and nineteenth-century music. That he excelled at these exercises is evident from his diary entry of October 1926: [Scalero] said my work was comparable to four of his crack pupils in New York who had studied five years and were ten years older than I. I can’t see how he liked my counterpoint. They were awful, I thought! After much frustration over endless counterpoint assignments, he exulted: Finished Counterpoint! Now I start Canon!! … Musically, I have become confirmed to the faith, and Scalero is my Saviour. (diary, November 1926) One of Barber’s most significant attributes during his student years was his ability to attract gifted musicians who welcomed the opportunity to perform his works. Those ‘ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA’ As part of the festivities marking the Barber centennial, the Curtis Opera Theatre, Opera Company of Philadelphia, and Kimmel Center Presents are offering a fully staged production of Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra on March 17, 19, and 21. Commissioned for the opening of the new opera house at Lincoln Center in 1966, the opera was one of the greatest tributes to Barber’s career—and, ironically, his nemesis. The overblown Zeffirelli production, with its complicated and problematic paraphernalia, eclipsed for the most part any serious evaluation of the music. In one scene there were 160 on stage, including three horses, two camels, an elephant, and sixty-five senators. Barber, who believed the opera contained some of his best work (an appraisal critics later concurred with), was not at all happy. “As far as I’m concerned,” he said, “the production had nothing to do with what I had imagined.” Over the next decade, Barber worked on revising the opera; the new version, staged and directed by Gian Carlo Menotti, placed the lovers into sharper focus and diminished the importance of the world at large. Elements of grand-opera spectacle are shunned in favor of a more intimate production in which the chorus, as in Greek tragedy, sings from each side of the stage. Antony and Cleopatra contains some of Barber’s most dramatically realized vocal music; his particular taste for the play of orchestral color, his treatment of individual instruments with exquisite subtlety of relief, and his ability to handle large blocks of sound that suddenly and dramatically dissolve into chamber music are living tokens of a great musical imagination. –B. B. H. 8 OVERTONES SPRING 2010 students who carried his art to the public in New York, Florida, and London, as well as Philadelphia, included Rose Bampton, Benjamin de Loache, Jeanne Behrend, and members of the Swastika (later the Curtis) Quartet—Gama Gilbert, Benjamin Sharlip, Max Aronoff, and Orlando Cole. They performed Barber’s student works and saw him win his first prizes, confirming his destiny as an internationally renowned composer. And it was at Curtis, in 1928, that Barber and Gian Carlo Menotti first forged their profound personal and professional relationship. Mrs. Bok enlisted Barber as a big brother to the younger composer, who then spoke no English. Eventually, in 1942, she helped them purchase their home overlooking Croton Reservoir in New York, in which they shared their lives for more than thirty years. In 1956 Menotti wrote the libretto and directed Barber’s first commission for the Metropolitan Opera, Vanessa. Barber was devoted to Mary Louise Curtis Bok; she was more than a philanthropist in the traditional sense. Beneath her gentle, calm, wise, and gracious exterior was a forceful spirit that pervaded the Institute. She dedicated herself to bringing her students’ talents to fruition by giving them personal encouragement as well as financial support. “One thing I have learned,” she said, “is that the talented youngster is no slacker!” Barber, in turn, wrote in his diary: We call Mrs. Bok “Mrs. God”! (26 December 1926) Mrs. Bok’s influential network of musical patrons led to numerous opportunities for her students. In 1930, for example, she asked Stokowski to give a reading of Barber’s first Samuel Barber, ca. 1937 piano concerto at a Philadelphia Orchestra rehearsal. The conductor’s qualified critique— PHOTO: ILSE HOFMANN/CURTIS ARCHIVES “much of the orchestral part is extremely good as music and orchestration. … He would do better if he would let go and forget the past and cut his way as a pioneer into his own future”—was a bitter blow to the young composer. But eventually he concurred with the maestro and destroyed this early effort. Ten years later, on the occasion of Mrs. Bok’s move to 1816 Delancey Street, Barber honored her with Song for a New House, a trio for piano, flute, and voice on words from Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. Barber had an early and meteoric rise to fame. Many of the works he wrote in his twenties and thirties are still in the repertory today—the Overture to The School for Scandal (1931), the Violin Concerto (1939), Knoxville: Summer of 1915 (1948), and, of course, one of the great masterpieces of the twentieth century, the famous, ubiquitous Adagio for Strings, originally the second movement of a quartet he wrote in 1936, which was premiered by Toscanini in its orchestral form in 1938. While at Curtis, and especially after 1940, Barber developed a unique way of working with the artists who would premiere his music—a kind of collaborative relationship that eventually became formalized. Sometimes, before beginning a work, he would invite the particular musician to his home in Mount Kisco, where they would play through their repertoire, in some cases even études and technical studies. Through this process, Barber would become aware of—and could write to—their particular strengths and predilections. A telling inscription appears on the last page of a sketchbook Barber kept in the late Barber with Curtis founder Mary Louise Curtis 1920s and ’30s, while he was at Curtis: Bok Zimbalist, en route to Bermuda in 1947 PHOTO: CURTIS ARCHIVES 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. Although these are Franz Liszt’s words about contemporary poet Alphonse de Lamartine, they are Samuel Barber’s credo. He knew just how far to go without disrupting the continuity with tradition. I do not consider him a conservative in the reactionary sense; rather he is a conservator, bringing new vitality to the harmonic language of the late nineteenth century, infusing elements of twentieth-century modernism—dissonance and even serialism— without compromising lyrical expression. Dr. Barbara B. Heyman, musicologist and editor, is author of the ASCAP Award–winning book Samuel Barber: The Composer and His Music (Oxford University Press, 1992, 1994), and “A Comprehensive Thematic Catalog of the Complete Works of Samuel Barber” (Oxford University Press, 2010), for which she received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, 2006–07.