Ebook: Samuel Barber: His Life and Legacy

A pivotal twentieth-century composer, Samuel Barber earned a long list of honors and accolades that included two Pulitzer Prizes for Music and the public support of conductors like Arturo Toscanini, Serge Koussevitzky, and Leonard Bernstein. Barber's works have since become standard concert repertoire and continue to flourish across high art and popular culture.

Acclaimed biographer Howard Pollack (Aaron Copland, George Gershwin) offers a multifaceted account of Barber's life and music while placing the artist in his social and cultural milieu. Born into a musical family, Barber pursued his artistic ambitions from childhood. Pollack follows Barber's path from his precocious youth through a career where, from the start, the composer consistently received prizes, fellowships, and other recognition. Stylistic analyses of works like the Adagio for Strings, the Violin Concerto, Knoxville: Summer of 1915 for voice and orchestra, the Piano Concerto, and the operas Vanessa and Antony and Cleopatra, stand alongside revealing accounts of the music's commissioning, performance, reception, and legacy. Throughout, Pollack weaves in accounts of Barber's encounters with colleagues like Aaron Copland and Francis Poulenc, performers from Eleanor Steber and Leontyne Price to Vladimir Horowitz and Van Cliburn, patrons, admirers, and a wide circle of eminent friends and acquaintances. He also provides an eloquent portrait of the composer's decades-long relationship with the renowned opera composer Gian Carlo Menotti.

Informed by new interviews and immense archival research, Samuel Barber is a long-awaited critical and personal biography of a monumental figure in twentieth-century American music.

|Introduction

Samuel Barber and His Family

A Musical Education

Personal Matters: Early Years

Other Formative Experiences

Early Works Through 1932

More Adventures at Home and Abroad, 1933-1939

Music for a Scene from Shelley and One Day of Spring

Songs and Choruses, 1934-1940

The First Symphony and the String Quartet

Adagio for Strings and the First Essay

The Violin Concerto and Second Essay

In the Army

The Second Symphony and Excursions

Capricorn Concerto and the Cello Concerto

Barber and His Contemporaries

Medea

Knoxville: Summer of 1915 and "Nuvoletta"

The Piano Sonata and Mélodies passagères

Personal Matters: Later Years

A Composer's Life

Souvenirs and Hermit Songs

Prayers of Kierkegaard, Adventure, and Summer Music

Vanessa

From the Nocturne to Die Natali

The Piano Concerto and Andromache's Farewell

The Creation of Antony and Cleopatra

Antony and Cleopatra in Performance

From Chorale for Ascension Day to The Lovers

From Fadograph of a Yestern Scene to the Canzonetta

Epilogue and Conclusion

Notes

Index

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"Howard Pollack's 'Samuel Barber: His Life and Legacy,' which continues his remarkable series of books on American composers and lyricists, may be the finest biography of an American classical musician since Anthony Tommasini's 'Virgil Thomson: Composer on the Aisle.'. . . Pollack is a master of writing about artistic creation without forbidding jargon, his explanations of Barber's music are just as arresting as the biographical passages." —Wall Street Journal

"Will surely be the authoritative work on talented composer Barber for decades to come. This monumental book is both the account of a fascinating life and a detailed assessment of the composer's...