Samuel Barber

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara B. Heyman
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Vocal Music ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
Antony And Cleopatra ◽  
Creative Processes ◽  
American Composers ◽  
Metropolitan Opera ◽  
Samuel Barber ◽  
Entire Career ◽  
Lincoln Center

Samuel Barber (1910–1981) was one of the most important and honored American composers of the twentieth century. Writing in a great variety of musical forms—symphonies, concertos, operas, vocal music, chamber music—he infused his works with poetic lyricism and gave tonal language and forms new vitality. His rich legacy includes such famous compositions as the Adagio for Strings, the orchestral song Knoxville: Summer of 1915, three concertos, and his two operas, the Pulitzer Prize–winning Vanessa and Antony and Cleopatra, a commissioned work that opened the new Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center in New York. Generously documented by letters, sketchbooks, original musical manuscripts, and interviews with friends, colleagues, and performers with whom he worked, this book covers Barber’s entire career and all of his compositions. The biographical material on Barber is closely interspersed with a discussion of his music, displaying Barber’s creative processes at work from his early student compositions to his mature masterpieces. The book also provides the social context in which this major composer grew: his education; how he built his career; the evolving musical tastes of American audiences; his relationship with Gian Carlo Menotti and such musical giants as Serge Koussevitzky, Arturo Toscanini, Vladimir Horowitz; and the role of radio in the promotion of his music. A testament to the significance of neo-Romanticism, Samuel Barber stands as a model biography of an important American musical figure.

Lincoln Center Commissions

Samuel Barber ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 451-469
Author(s):  
Barbara B. Heyman
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Emotional Expression ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
100Th Anniversary ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
Piano Concerto ◽  
Compositional Process ◽  
Antony And Cleopatra ◽  
Lincoln Center ◽  
Individual Style

For the opening week of the new Philharmonic Hall at New York’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in 1962, Barber composed a piano concerto in honor of the 100th anniversary of his publisher. The concerto was tailored to the technical prowess and individual style of John Browning, reflecting the Russian influence of his piano teacher Rosina Lhévinne. The second movement was a reworking of an earlier piece, Elegy, written for Manfred Ibel, a young art student and amateur flute player, to whom Barber dedicated his piano concerto. This chapter details Barber’s compositional process and influences for each movement of the concerto and describes the enthusiastic reception of the debut performance. Nearing completion of the concerto, Barber was invited to Russia as the first American composer ever to attend the biennial Congress of Soviet Composers, where he freely discussed his compositional philosophy and methods. For the concerto, Barber won his second Pulitzer Prize and the Annual Award of the Music Critics Circle of New York. His second composition for the opening season of Lincoln Center was Andromache’s Farewell, for soprano and orchestra. Based on a scene from Euripides’s The Trojan Women, the piece displayed deep emotional expression and striking imagery. With a superior opera singer, Martina Arroyo, singing the solo part, the success of Andromache’s Farewell presaged Barber’s opera Antony and Cleopatra.

The Last Years, 1967–1981

Samuel Barber ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 504-553
Author(s):  
Barbara B. Heyman
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Song Cycle ◽  
Vocal Music ◽  
String Orchestra ◽  
Antony And Cleopatra ◽  
Finnegans Wake ◽  
Central Park ◽  
Choral Works ◽  
Short Forms ◽  
Metropolitan Opera

During the last fifteen years of his life, Barber struggled with depression, alcoholism, and creative blocks. His publisher believed this was due to the reception of Antony and Cleopatra, but Barber’s annual pilgrimages to Europe had begun much earlier, and it was more likely that the forced sale of Capricorn, the home he and Menotti had shared for three decades, contributed to his low morale. The upheaval was equivalent to the dissolution of a marriage. Money from the Metropolitan Opera commission enabled him to build a chalet in Santa Cristina, where he spent most of his time. He did not withdraw from composing but turned to what had been most gratifying: writing vocal music in short forms, choosing biographically pointed texts reflecting a preoccupation with dark and quasi-religious themes. He produced the song cycle Despite and Still, two choral works, and Mutations from Bach for brass. He wrote Chorale for Ascension Day for the Washington National Cathedral and an elaborate work for chorus, vocal solos, and the Philadelphia Orchestra, The Lovers. A commission for the new Alcoa Hall in Pittsburgh resulted in Fadograph of a Yestern Scene, an orchestral piece inspired by a passage in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Barber composed Three Songs, op. 45, and in 1974 wrote a piano piece, Ballade. That commission allowed him to purchase an apartment overlooking Central Park in New York. In the summer of 1978, he began a concerto for oboe and orchestra, but as his health worsened, he realized he would not be able to complete it and titled the single movement Canzonetta for Oboe and String Orchestra. He was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, and in spite of chemotherapy, Barber died on January 23, 1981.

A New Opera House

Samuel Barber ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 470-503
Author(s):  
Barbara B. Heyman
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Antony And Cleopatra ◽  
Metropolitan Opera ◽  
History Of ◽  
Opera House ◽  
Lincoln Center ◽  
Franco Zeffirelli ◽  
Technical Failures ◽  
Critical Reviews

The commission that was one of the greatest tributes to Barber’s career turned out to be his nemesis. Antony and Cleopatra, written for the opening of the new Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center in New York, was handicapped by the inflated Franco Zeffirelli production, with its problematic paraphernalia, including camels and goats and a malfunctioning pyramid, which eclipsed serious evaluation of the music. This chapter narrates how the opera based on Barber’s favorite Shakespeare play came to life, how he handpicked the major characters ̶—Leontyne Price for Cleopatra and Justino Díaz for Antony ̶—and how these artists devoted themselves to the literature and history of their roles. Although Barber’s work here was no less brilliant, the critics felt that the failure of the opera was due to overproduction, with an infusion of mechanical and technical failures. After the premiere, Barber boarded the SS Constitution for Europe. Over the next decade, he devoted his energies intermittently toward a revision of the opera in collaboration with Menotti. In 1975, four performances of the more intimate version with increased lyric meditation were presented at the Juilliard School. Critical reviews of a production at the Spoleto Festival in Italy after Barber died gave much attention to the musical strengths of the opera, with uniform appreciation of Barber as a master of orchestra and choral writing. Performances followed in Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia.

The Plays of David Mamet: Games of Manipulation and Power

1988 ◽  
Vol 4 (13) ◽  
pp. 77-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry I. Schvey
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
American Business ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
Harold Pinter ◽  
David Mamet ◽  
Royal Court ◽  
Business Values ◽  
Lincoln Center ◽  
World Premiere ◽  
One Act

David Mamet, born in Chicago in 1947, is one of the most talented and eagerly watched young playwrights in America today, whose work has also found a ready response among British audiences. After such plays asSexual Perversity in Chicago(1974).American Buffalo(1975) andEdmond(1982), hisGlengarry Glen Ross(1982), dedicated to Harold Pinter, had its world premiere in London at the National's Cottesloe Theatre, and subsequently won the Pulitzer prize for the best American play in 1984. In the same year,American Buffalo(seen briefly on Broadway in 1977) won an award for best revival, while the London production ofEdmond, which opened at the Royal Court in December 1985, was favourably received by English critics in contrast to its mixed reception in New York. In addition to Mamet's work for the stage, he has written the screenplays for the filmsThe VerdictandThe Postman Always Rings Twice. Noteworthy for their sensitivity to the nuances and rhythms of American speech, including its unmistakable penchant for banalities and obscenities. Mamet's best plays, as the accompanying essay demonstrates, carry with them an implicit attack on American business values, usually through a confrontation between two individuals, one of whom tries to exploit or dominate the other. The interview which follows was conducted in New York City on 2 January 1986 following a performance of Mamet's latest work, a double bill of one–act plays entitledThe ShawlandPrairie du Chien, selected by Mamet's friend and close associate at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, Gregory Mosher, to reopen the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center in New York.

Google Hangout with Annie Baker, Playwright 1/25/16, 2:33 PM

2016 ◽  
Vol 69 (4) ◽  
pp. 57-64
Author(s):  
Genevieve Yue
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New England ◽  
Selection Process ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
Film Festival ◽  
The Past

Genevieve Yue interviews playwright Annie Baker, whose Pulitzer Prize–winning play The Flick focuses on the young employees of a single-screen New England movie house. Baker is one of the most critically lauded playwrights to emerge on the New York theater scene in the past ten years, in part due to her uncompromising commitment to experimentation and disruption. Baker intrinsically understands that arriving at something meaningful means taking a new way. Accordingly, Baker did not want to conduct a traditional interview for Film Quarterly. After running into each other at a New York Film Festival screening of Chantal Akerman's No Home Movie (2015)—both overwhelmed by the film—Yue and Baker agreed to begin their conversation by choosing a film neither of them had seen before and watching it together. The selection process itself led to a long discussion, which led to another, and then finally, to the Gmail hangout that forms the basis of the interview.

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Harris
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New York City ◽  
Driving Force ◽  
George Balanchine ◽  
Current State ◽  
The Arts ◽  
History Of ◽  
Lincoln Center

The Conclusion briefly examines the current state of the New York City Ballet under the auspices of industrial billionaire David H. Koch at Lincoln Center. In so doing, it to introduces a series of questions, warranting still more exploration, about the rapid and profound evolution of the structure, funding, and role of the arts in America through the course of the twentieth century. It revisits the historiographical problem that drives Making Ballet American: the narrative that George Balanchine was the sole creative genius who finally created an “American” ballet. In contrast to that hagiography, the Conclusion reiterates the book’s major contribution: illuminating the historical construction of our received idea of American neoclassical ballet within a specific set of social, political, and cultural circumstances. The Conclusion stresses that the history of American neoclassicism must be seen as a complex narrative involving several authors and discourses and crossing national and disciplinary borders: a history in which Balanchine was not the driving force, but rather the outcome.

International Opera in Nineteenth-century New York

2020 ◽  
pp. 244-269
Author(s):  
Karen Ahlquist
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
World War I ◽  
Buenos Aires ◽  
Considerable Extent ◽  
World War ◽  
Metropolitan Opera ◽  
The City

This chapter charts how canonic repertories evolved in very different forms in New York City during the nineteenth century. The unstable succession of entrepreneurial touring troupes that visited the city adapted both repertory and individual pieces to the audience’s taste, from which there emerged a major theater, the Metropolitan Opera, offering a mix of German, Italian, and French works. The stable repertory in place there by 1910 resembles to a considerable extent that performed in the same theater today. Indeed, all of the twenty-five operas most often performed between 1883 and 2015 at the Metropolitan Opera were written before World War I. The repertory may seem haphazard in its diversity, but that very condition proved to be its strength in the long term. This chapter is paired with Benjamin Walton’s “Canons of real and imagined opera: Buenos Aires and Montevideo, 1810–1860.”

Chicago's Auditorium Building: Opera or Anarchism

1998 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 128-159 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph M. Siry
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Social History ◽  
Chicago School ◽  
Paris Opera ◽  
Metropolitan Opera ◽  
History Of ◽  
Opera House ◽  
Opera Houses

Adler and Sullivan's Auditorium Building in Chicago (1886-1890) is here analyzed in the context of Chicago's social history of the 1880s. Specifically, the building is seen as a capitalistic response to socialist and anarchist movements of the period. The Auditorium's principal patron, Ferdinand W. Peck, created a theater that was to give access to cultural and civic events for the city's workers, to draw them away from both politicized and nonpoliticized "low" urban entertainments. Adler and Sullivan's theater was to serve a mass audience, unlike opera houses of the period, which held multiple tiers of boxes for privileged patrons. This tradition was represented by the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City (1881-1883). Turning away from works like the Paris Opéra, Peck and his architects perhaps sought to emulate ideas of other European theaters of the period, such as Bayreuth's Festspielhaus (1872-1876). Sullivan's interior had an ornamental and iconographic program that was innovative relative to traditional opera houses. His design of the building's exterior was in a Romanesque style that recalled ancient Roman monuments. It is here compared with other Chicago buildings of its era that represented high capital's reaction to workers' culture, such as Burnham and Root's First Regiment Armory (1889-1891), Peck's own house (1887), and the Chicago Athenaeum (1890-1891). The Auditorium's story invites a view of the Chicago School that emphasizes the role of patrons' ideological agenda rather than modern structural expression.

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