The Saddest Music Ever Written: The Story of Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings by Larson Thomas

Author:Larson, Thomas [Larson, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Pegasus
Published: 2010-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

From Knoxville to Kierkegaard

THE MOST FLORAL DISPLAY OF BARBER’S NOSTALGIA and regret blooms in his Knoxville: Summer of 1915, for soprano and orchestra. The piece is a setting of James Agee’s prose poem, which describes, from a child’s growing awareness, the oneness of his family’s summer evenings—its ritual, its community, its comfort. Essential, though, is the child’s ambivalence toward his relatives. The adult, looking back, is both captivated and crushed by the memory. He loves them but is shocked that they “will not ever tell me who I am.” Agee composed the work quickly in 1937. It shares with Whitman a mania for cataloging and for showcasing the writer’s dual viewpoint as witness and participant, then and now. What he evokes also evokes his feeling for it. Agee, who had written traditional metered verse, fashioned Knoxville as an antilyric. The piece harnesses the idioms of American speech, which, as they are seldom periodic, possess irregular accents and falling cadences. Such utterances—“They are talking much, and the talk is quiet, of nothing in particular, of nothing at all in particular, of nothing at all”—are hardly what we regard as poetic. But we do recognize the lilting ease and the (now lost) unhurriedness of our vernacular.

In 1947, Barber had a family crisis: both his father and his aunt Louise were gravely ill. Both would soon die. That spring he discovered Agee’s prose poem. He writes to his uncle, “The text moved me very much.” He says that “this was actually prose, but I put it into lines to make the rhythmic pattern clear. It reminded me so much of summer evenings in West Chester, now very far away. It expresses a child’s feeling of loneliness, wonder, and lack of identity in that marginal world between twilight and sleep.” Indeed, Barber came alive in this “marginal world.” Most of his slow movements and lyric portraits occupy that crepuscular in-between where he felt secure.

Barber writes that his response to Agee’s piece, after receiving a commission from Eleanor Steber, was “immediate and intense. I think I must have composed Knoxville within a few days.” (Much the same was true for Agee who, in several of his works, revised little of what he wrote, calling it “improvisatory writing.”) This was Barber’s tack: “When I’m writing music for words,” he said, “I immerse myself in those words, and then let the music flow out of them.” Put differently, there must be music in the words for them to prompt the same in the composer. Barber’s musical affinity for language is rare, especially his ability to “hear,” if that’s right, music nascent in words. Most composers when setting a text “hear” a kind of musical equivalent: the sound illustrates the motion and meaning of the words. Barber got something else from language, which is difficult to describe. He heard in Agee, in the impassioned work of documentary prose Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and in the God-seeking meditations of the Danish writer Søren Kierkegaard, the rhapsodic element of their language, for which he felt a compositional kinship.

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