Samuel Barber

• Born: March 9, 1910, West Chester, Pennsylvania
• Died: January 23, 1981, New York City
  
  

Symphony No. 1 in One Movement. Op. 9

• Composed: completed February 24, 1936, Roquebrune, France
• Premiere: December 13, 1936, Bernardo Molinari conducting the Augusteo Orchestra at the Adriano Theater, Rome
• Instrumentation: 3 flutes (incl. piccolo), 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, cymbals, harp, strings
• May Festival notable performances: This is the first performance of this work at the May Festival. First CSO: October 1963, Milton Katims conducting. Most Recent CSO: December 2012, Jacques Lacombe conducting.
• Duration: approx. 21 minutes

To some extent, Samuel Barber’s Symphony No. 1 (1936) represents both a pivot toward increasingly ambitious projects and a summation of the composer’s musical life up to that point. Prior to beginning his first symphony, Barber had completed two compact works for full orchestra: the Overture to the School for Scandal (1931) and Music for a Scene from Shelley (1933). Both come from the transitional period between his course of study at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music and the early days of his nascent career. In their energetic lyricism and brooding turbulence, respectively, these antecedent pieces foreshadow moods heard in Symphony No. 1. School for Scandal especially exhibits its composer’s penchant for well-crafted melodies and his academic command of technique, seen in balanced contrasting themes and a tightly controlled structure. Of practical concern, Music for a Scene from Shelley, along with his Sonata for Cello and Piano (1932), garnered Barber the Rome Prize in Music Composition that provided both the time and resources to compose Symphony No. 1, as well as the professional connections that led to its premiere performance. The symphony’s overall success provided Barber a launchpad to compose some of his most popular and successful orchestral works over the ensuing decade, including his famous Adagio for Strings (1936, also composed during his Rome Prize residency), the First Essay for Orchestra (1937), Violin Concerto (1939), Second Essay for Orchestra (1942), and modernist-inflected Symphony No. 2 (1944), the only work in his output to ever include an electronic instrument (later revised out).

Years after the premiere of Symphony No. 1, Barber’s friend and benefactor, Edith Braun, reported that the composer had devised the piece’s opening musical motif while walking in Vienna at the turn of 1933–34, a suggestion confirmed by notes in Barber’s sketchbook from this time. His earnest attention to the project caught hold later during the summer of 1935 while living and working in Maine. Barber completed a draft of the work back in Europe in Rome in late 1935, then the full score on February 24, 1936 while in the French Riviera city of Roquebrune, where he was on leave from a Rome Prize residency at the American Academy. In its compositional history, the project thus represents the cosmopolitanism of an individual who was born and trained in the United States, but whose sensibilities consistently drew him to Europe for long stretches year after year, particularly to the family villa of his Italian-born partner Gian Carlo Menotti.

The same year of the piece’s composition, Barber’s Curtis classmate and friend, pianist Jeanne Behrend, put in a good word with conductor Bernardino Molinari. Barber played his symphony for the conductor and, impressed, Molinari added the piece to the upcoming season of Rome’s Augusteo Orchestra (today the Orchestra of the National Academy of St. Cecilia), and the world premiere took place on December 13 at the Adriano Theater. As with other of Barber’s career successes, personal-professional connections thus bore fruit for the then-emerging composer. Italy’s cultural conditions were auspicious for such a premiere, as the country’s orchestral landscape thrived under Mussolini’s government. The regime marshalled the symbolic muscularity and militaristic discipline of symphony orchestras while permitting new music of wide-ranging styles, from futurism to modernist aesthetics in the work of composers like of Ottorino Respighi and Luigi Dallapiccola. Although Barber was somewhat underwhelmed by Molinari and Augusteo’s premiere performance (Barber’s hopes for the piece would later be fulfilled at the 1937 American premiere by The Cleveland Orchestra), audiences generally embraced the piece, admiring its exemplification of expected characteristics of symphonies at this time. Full-throated breadth and monumentality alternate with passages demanding pinpoint precision and clarity, all carefully conveyed in coloristic and technically sound instrument choices for both melody and harmony.

The symphony’s most prominent trait may be Barber’s choice to write the entirety as a single, continuous whole, rather than a traditional set of four separate movements—the architecture for symphonies by Johannes Brahms or Amy Beach. Different from other one-movement genres like overtures or symphonic poems, Barber arranged this symphony’s musical ideas to mimic the traditional symphony’s separate movements, patterned as a bold fast movement, then playful dance-like movement, lyrical slow movement, and resounding conclusion. We need not worry about viewing the piece this way, as Barber described the piece’s structure for program notes on the work’s New York premiere in 1937. The work begins with a rumbling announcement from the orchestra’s lowest-sounding instruments before the brass instruments stack a chord to support the woodwinds and strings’ pronouncement of the symphony’s central seven-note melody. A lurching, halting section follows this opening fanfare, leading to a more lyrical contrasting theme played by English horn and violas. Barber then passes these ideas around the orchestra in different guises, showcasing players’ abilities while providing a strong push to the playful second large section. In the second section, a solitary timpani roll ushers in a return of the symphony’s opening seven-note melody, but played much quicker by only violins at first. The idea travels around the orchestra, at times seeming to glide on ice, at others sounding more like the rhythmic vertigo of Morse code, reminiscent of the machine-obsessed futurist composers of the then-recent decades. Following a held silence, the lyrical third large section arrives, recalling the English horn and violas’ earlier melody, but this time played by oboe at a slower pace. The fourth and final section of the symphony begins with shivering string chords that dissipate, making space for the low strings’ revival of the opening seven-note motif as a somber passacaglia. Barber’s passacaglia, like its 17th-century Spanish model, was built from the ground up: a repeating melody in the low strings sets a foundation for variations on the symphony’s now-familiar ideas to soar above, a final push to the symphony’s end.

From a wider viewpoint, Barber completed the work during the periods surrounding World War II, in which American composers took up the onerous mantle of the symphony in the 1930s and 40s. Interesting comparisons may be made by listening to Barber’s symphony against, for instance, Roy Harris’ Third Symphony (1937) or Aaron Copland’s “Short” Symphony No. 2 (1932–33). Each is individual to its respective composer, but all share a one-movement structure, last around 20 minutes or less, and are at moments reminiscent of each other in character.

As Howard Pollack has written, the Barber symphony’s most substantial affinities lay with Jean Sibelius’ Symphony No. 7 (1924), the themes of which Barber’s notebooks show he was carefully studying around this time. Of greatest importance is its overall form, an adaptation of Sibelius’ similar continuous, one-movement structure. However, as biographer Barbara Heyman has noted, Barber marks his sections much more clearly than Sibelius—transitions between the large sections that condense a traditional four-movement symphony are marked by notable shifts in instrumentation, character or speed. Contemporaneous critics noticed the resemblance was more than technical, however: depending on the writer, the shared “nervous, tormented style” could either be a sign of artistic depth harkening to bygone eras or else a sticking point of Nordic moodiness and modernist pessimism. Such disagreements prefigure a protracted debate, beginning in 1938 in letters to the editor of the New York Times on American classical music sparked by Arturo Toscanini’s choice to program Barber’s Adagio for Strings on an NBC Symphony Orchestra broadcast. Letter writers staked positions asserting either that Toscanini had damaged American music’s advancement by programming a seemingly conservative work, or else made the case for a more open-minded view that supported good music regardless of whether it was conservative or modern. The Adagio might plausibly be argued to either side. Nevertheless, Barber’s output during his mid-30s Rome Prize period, including Symphony No. 1, proved auspicious for the proceeding decades of his career, demonstrating his ingenuity and craft and testifying to the staying power of his music.

—Dr. Jacques Dupuis