Classical Music Maniac: The Barber's Adagio for Strings

Samuel Barber

Title: Adagio for Strings

Composer: Samuel Barber

Complete Arranged in 1936

First performed in 1938 at New York Radio Studio

Adagio for Strings is a work by Samuel Barber, arguably his most well known, arranged for string orchestra from the second movement of his String Quartet, Op. 11. Barber finished the arrangement in 1936, the same year that he wrote the quartet. It was performed for the first time in 1938, in a radio broadcast from a New York studio attended by an invited audience, conducted by Arturo Toscanini, who also took the piece on tour to Europe and South America. Its reception was generally positive, with Alexander J. Morin writing that Adagio for Strings is "full of pathos and cathartic passion" and that it "rarely leaves a dry eye.”The music is the setting for Barber's 1967 choral arrangement of Agnus Dei. Adagio for Strings can be heard in many TV shows and movies.

Barber's Adagio for Strings began as the second movement of his String Quartet, Op. 11, composed in 1936 while he was spending a summer in Europe with his partner Gian Carlo Menotti, an Italian composer who was a fellow student at the Curtis Institute of Music. The inspiration came from Virgil's Georgics. In the quartet the Adagio follows a violently contrasting first movement (Molto allegro e appassionato) and is succeeded by music which opens with a brief reprise of the music from the first movement (marked Molto allegro (come prima) – Presto).

In January 1938 Barber sent an orchestrated version of the Adagio for Strings to Arturo Toscanini. The conductor returned the score without comment, which annoyed Barber. Toscanini then sent word through Menotti that he was planning to perform the piece and had returned it simply because he had already memorised it. It was reported that Toscanini did not look at the music again until the day before the premiere. On November 5, 1938, a selected audience was invited to Studio 8H in Rockefeller Center to watch Toscanini conduct the first performance, a radio broadcast which was recorded for posterity. Initially, the critical reception was positive, as seen in the review by The New York Times's Olin Downes. Downes praised the piece, but he was reproached by other critics who claimed that he overrated the piece.

Toscanini took Adagio for Strings on tour to South America and Europe, the first performances of the work on both continents. Over April 16–19, 1942, the piece had public performances by the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Eugene Ormandy at Carnegie Hall. Like the original 1938 performance, these were broadcast on radio and recorded.

Adagio for Strings was also played at the funeral of Albert Einstein, can be heard on all sorts of commercials and movie soundtracks, and has become a modern day hit among trance music pioneers, who have taken the hypnotic harmonies composed by Barber and used them to create very different, high octane sounds. The composer also arranged a choral version of the work, the Agnus Dei, in 1967.

Music

Adagio for Strings begins softly with a B-flat played by the first violins. The lower strings come in two beats after the violins, which, as Johanna Keller from The New York Times put it, creates "an uneasy, shifting suspension as the melody begins a stepwise motion, like the hesitant climbing of stairs.” NPR Music said that "with a tense melodic line and taut harmonies, the composition is considered by many to be the most popular of all 20th-century orchestral works." Many recordings of the piece have a duration of about eight minutes.

The Adagio is an example of arch form and builds on a melody that first ascends, then descends in stepwise fashion. Barber subtly manipulates the basic pulse throughout the work by constantly changing time signatures including 4/2, 5/2, 6/4, and 3/2. After four climactic chords and a long pause, the piece presents the opening theme again, and fades away on an unresolved dominant chord.

Music critic Olin Downes wrote that the piece is very simple at climaxes, but reasoned that the simple chords create significance for the piece. Downes went on to say: "That is because we have here honest music, by an honest musician, not striving for pretentious effect, not behaving as a writer would who, having a clear, short, popular word handy for his purpose, got the dictionary and fished out a long one."

Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings is a short instrumental piece for orchestra. The work is a slow, minor-key lament, which evokes a deep sadness in those who hear it… The Adagio has captured the emotions of millions of listeners since Barber first wrote it as the middle movement of a string quartet in September 1936.

—Thomas Larson, on Adagio for Strings.

Barber's Adagio for Strings video: