Composer Samuel Barber

One of the more delicious books to land on my desk recently is The Saddest Music Ever Written, by Thomas Larson (Pegasus Books), about Samuel Barber’s immortal piece, Adagio for Strings--  and I mean all about the Adagio for Strings, which the author calls “the Pietà of music.”  

According to the jacket copy, the book is “an explanation of the cultural impact” of the iconic work and “its enigmatic composer… a melancholic who, in later years, descended into alcoholism and severe depression.”  If you love the Adagio and the rest of Barber’s work as much as I do, you’ll devour the book-- which contains a fascinating history of the genesis of the Adagio and its various forms, which include a string quartet movement and a choral work (Barber’s setting of the “Agnus Dei”).  There are also fascinating historical anecdotes about the life and stellar career of Barber (1910-1981)—including his personal and professional relationship with composer Gian Carlo Menotti, his operatic triumph with Vanessa (1958), and his failure with Antony and Cleopatra (1966)—as well as some nuanced, layered thinking about the relationship between music and melancholy. 

Not that melancholic was precisely how the composer himself saw this work.  Author Larson, responding to a claim that Barber “viewed it not as a work to inspire mourning but as one that illustrates the redemptive powers of inward reflection,” says that he likes the idea, “since it speaks to the chameleonic and ever evolving nature of the piece….”  Ironically, though, Barber grew “testy” about the Adagio, which came to be used to memorialize the deaths of Einstein, Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, Princess Grace, and countless other well-known figures.  “He actually requested,” writes the author, “that his most famous piece not be played at his funeral.”

The Saddest Music Ever Written launches on September 15, 2010.  About the book, the Emerson String Quartet’s Eugene Drucker says, “rarely, if ever, have nine minutes of music been subjected  to such intense cultural, historical, and emotional analysis.”

--Florestan

RECOMMENDED LISTENING

• Leonard Slatkin Conducts Barber’s Adagio for Strings (YouTube)

A touching tribute to those who lost their lives on 9/11, with the BBC Orchestra.

• Barber’s “Agnus Dei” (YouTube)

Choral version of “Agnus Dei” sung to the theme of Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings. Performed by The Choir of Trinity College, Cambridge, UK, directed by Richard Marlow.

The rain held off, magically, until the very end of the New York Philharmonic’s concert in New York’s Central Park last week.  The orchestra had just played the last notes of Ravel’s Bolero when the first drops fell and the assembled crowd-- thirty thousand strong!-- burst into enthusiastic applause.  Fireworks planned for the evening had to be cancelled, due to the weather, but still the evening was fun—especially because the Philharmonic shared its stage that night with a guest: the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of Long Yu. 

The Shanghai orchestra delivered a beautifully nuanced rendition of Wagner’s overture to Tannhäuser-- though for all the stadium-type amplification it was hard to tell exactly what they sounded like-- and they dazzled with Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, starring (there’s no better word) the pianist Lang Lang.  And though they were in town (and had payed for the opportunity to play that night) to promote the Shanghai Expo, which opened on May 1 and runs through October 31, the Shanghai orchestra brought a great deal of buoyant cross-cultural friendship to the park that night, and New Yorkers returned it warmly.

Especially the guy pictured above, who expressed his friendship by snapping photos all through the concert.  His behavior was a little distracting, but the evening was so lovely that we decided to give him a pass—well, except for mentioning his boorishness in a blog entry that will be seen on six continents. 

And we mention this not in annoyance, but out of concern for the welfare of this guy and other people like him.  Sure, he may have distracted a few other concert-goers—though the rules of behavior for such outdoor concerts are certainly relaxed enough to encompass picnicking and the like.  And yes, we enforce stricter rules inside concert halls and theaters, because otherwise we’d have vulgarians of all sorts taking pictures and chatting on cell phones during even Chopin’s most delicate moments.  The larger point is that this poor guy never seemed to enter the experience of the music itself, and that’s a shame.  He never seemed to let the enjoyment of listening supersede the idea of him attending a concert and “documenting” the event for his Facebook page.  Somehow, we doubt this guy noticed the subtle, soulful play of inner voices that Lang Lang brought to some of the sexier passages of the Gershwin.

(Or would you say he was just having a good time, his way, and that's good enough?)

--Florestan

A lovely, pre-concert moment in the fountain plaza at Lincoln Center—with culture lovers on their way to see American Ballet Theatre’s Swan Lake, at the Metropolitan Opera House; conductor Alan Gilbert’s reading of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis with the New York Philharmonic, at Fisher Hall; and a New York City Ballet mixed bill including Balanchine’s 1954 America-fest Western Symphony, at the David H. Koch Theater.

In the background, one of the most spectacularly banal, pseudo-luxury buildings in New York: One Lincoln Plaza (20 West 64^th Street), known for its oppressively low ceilings, soul-deadening hallways, and, oh yeah, high-priced apartments.

Built in 1971, the first of a rash of new buildings to cash in on the opening of Lincoln Center, One Lincoln Plaza is also shamed by its prominent location.  Everyone standing in the plaza, looking eastward, always asks why there should be a building there at all, and not an allée of greenery connecting with Central Park, a block away.  That possibility did occur to the planners of Lincoln Center, back in the ‘50s and ‘60s, but the urban renewal monster was not ferocious enough to eat up that much real estate, some of it, on Central Park West, historically important.  The few square blocks of so-called slums that are now Lincoln Center were all it could manage to chomp through at the time.

Here are a few details, from New York 1960, Architecture and Urbanism Between The Second World War and the Bicentennial, by Robert A. M. Stern, Thomas Mellins, and David Fishman:

In November 1966, following the completion of the Metropolitan Opera House, the architect William F. R. Ballard, who served as chairman of the City Planning Commission, proposed the construction of a monumental mall connecting Lincoln Center's main plaza with Central Park to the east. The landscaped mall was intended to fully occupy the block bounded by Broadway, Central Park West, Sixty-third and Sixty-fourth streets; a 1,000-car garage would be located beneath it.

The mall had the support of Wallace Harrison who, along with other members of his advisory committee, had ten years earlier advocated the organization of Lincoln Center around a central plaza, which they hoped would ultimately be approached by a grand allee leading from Central Park.... Ballard's plan... called on the city to acquire the property as parkland through eminent domain and would have necessitated the demolition of three architecturally significant buildings: the Ethical Culture Society School (Robert D. Kohn and Carrere & Hastings, 1902), on the northwest corner of Central Park West and Sixty-third Street; the adjacent Ethical Culture Society Hall (Robert D. Kohn, 1911), on the southwest corner of Central Park West and Sixty-fourth Street; and the West Side Branch of the YMCA (Dwight James Baum, 1930), at 5 West Sixty-third Street....  Vehement opposition soon arose from the society, as well as from the YMCA and from the New York Academy of Science, which owned the western portion of the block and had already cleared the site to make way for a twenty-one-story headquarters building.

--Florestan