At the beginning of Samuel Barber's career, his Adagio for Strings quickly made him one of America's most respected composers. By the time his Piano Concerto won a Pulitzer Prize, he was already a recognized artist. Both works will be heard at the Czech Philharmonic concert with Simon Rattle and the superstar pianist Yuja Wang. Dmitri Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony concludes the programme.
“Dear Mother: I have written this to tell you my worrying secret. Now don’t cry when you read it because it is neither yours nor my fault. I suppose I will have to tell it now without any nonsense. To begin with, I was not meant to be an athlet [sic]. I was meant to be a composer, and will be I’m sure. I’ll ask you one more thing.—Don’t ask me to try to forget this unpleasant thing and go play football.—Please—Sometimes I’ve been worrying about this so much that it makes me mad (not very).”
– letter from the nine-year-old Samuel Barber
Samuel Barber proceeded to do as he had predicted back in 1919. Having begun composing at the age of seven, by age ten he was writing the opera The Rose Tree to a libretto by the family cook. It soon became apparent that he would not comply with his father’s wishes by following his footsteps into the career of a physician. At age 13 he obtained the position of organist at Westminster Church in West Chester, and when he left four years later, he became a student the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.
When Barber completed the second movement of his String Quartet Op. 11, he was living in Austria on a scholarship. “I have just finished the slow movement of my quartet today—it is a knockout!!”, he wrote to a relative. He was not mistaken: the arrangement of his Adagio, with its sorrowful melody, soon became popular in America, even beyond the realm of classical music, and Barber became one of his country’s most celebrated composers.
Following the Adagio, the superstar pianist Yuja Wang will play Barber’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Piano Concerto.
