Active Years: 1910-1981

Position: American Composer

Career Highlights: Adagio for Strings, Violin Concerto, Piano Concerto, Vanessa.

Career Totals: Three operas; two ballets; two symphonies; one each of string quartet, violin concerto, cello concerto, cello sonata, piano concerto and piano sonata; three “essays” for orchestra; miscellaneous orchestral and chamber pieces; dozens of songs and other vocal works.

Scouting Report: The Adagio for Strings (1938) became the most performed and recorded concert piece by an American. Nothing Samuel Barber wrote in the remaining forty years of his career even came close to its success. Since his career happened to coincide with the rise of serialism, his style was too old-fashioned to please most critics; but it was a shade too cultivated to make most of his music popular with the masses. The 1966 premiere of his opera Antony and Cleopatra was a huge public disaster. By all accounts an outspoken man who was not afraid to make enemies, Barber suffered from depression, alcoholism, and a long creative silence late in life. His opus numbers end at a ridiculously low 48. He didn’t conduct, teach, theorize, write articles or give interviews. And the fact is, he looked like a banker, not a composer. Despite all this, thanks to a myriad of new recordings and a new generation of critics, Barber is now placed alongside Elliot Carter as one of the two greatest American composers of his era.

Teammates and Contemporaries: Aaron Copland, William Schuman, Roy Harris, Elliott Carter. Gian-Carlo Menotti shared Barber’s country house for many years, and wrote the libretto for Barber’s opera Vanessa.

Fun Statistic: At the age of 26, he wrote to a friend: “I have just finished the slow movement of my quartet today — it’s a knockout!” The “knockout” was in fact the piece he would later reorchestrate as the Adagio for Strings.