Composers Datebook™ is a daily two-minute program designed to inform, engage, and entertain listeners with timely information about composers of the past and present. Each program notes significant or intriguing musical events involving composers of the past and present, with appropriate and accessible music related to each.
Barber offers "two for the price of one"
On today's date in 1938, two orchestral works by the American composer Samuel Barber received their very high-profile premiere performances, on a live, coast-to-coast broadcast by the NBC Symphony conducted by Arturo Toscanini. Toscanini had met Barber in Austria the previous year, when Barber's Symphony No. 1 was performed at the 1937 Salzburg Music Festival. The symphony impressed Toscanini so much that he asked Barber for a short orchestral piece he might perform with the NBC Symphony. Barber offered Toscanini his pick of two short pieces, and must have been surprised when Toscanini agreed to perform BOTH of them: a newly-composed "Essay for Orchestra" and Barber's arrangement for full string orchestra of a movement from a String Quartet he had written in 1936. As the "Adagio for Strings," the latter work was destined to become Barber's best-known single work. Elegiac and frankly emotional in tone, Barber's "Adagio" acquired a special resonance during World War Two, as a threnody for America's war dead. It was also performed at the funeral of the wartime President Franklin D. Roosevelt. More recently, Barber's "Adagio" has been used to great effect in several successful films, including "The Elephant Man" and "Platoon." In a memorial tribute to Barber, American composer Ned Rorem wrote, "If Barber, 25 years old when the 'Adagio' was completed, later aimed higher, he never reached deeper into the heart."