This Day in Classical Music History (Birth of Samuel Barber, Composer of “Saddest Music Ever Written”)

March 9, 1910—Samuel Barber, a composer good enough to win the Pulitzer Prize twice but best known for “Adagio for Strings,” the heart-rending instrumental used in the film Platoon and in the funerals for heads of state, was born in West Chester, Penn.

In the mid-1980s, thousands of Americans such as myself who had never heard of “Adagio,” let alone Barber, were exposed to it for the first time as accompaniment to the grim images of Oliver Stone’s Vietnam film, Platoon. Half of the searing impact of that Oscar-winning production, I think, came from this composition created by Barber nearly a half-century before.

Now that I think of it, the course of the instrumental parallels very well the course of America’s Indochina tragedy. There was the same beginning—quiet, soon picking up in uneasiness, mounting, in a kind of Yeatsian widening gyre of unrest, until, after eight minutes, this groundswell subsides, exhausted, still unable to be resolved.

After seeing Platoon, I heard from a co-worker that this same music had served as the aural backdrop to John F. Kennedy’s funeral procession in 1963. How fitting, I thought, that this music evoking dislocation and a grief beyond words was used to commemorate the passing of the President who, like thousands of young men in Vietnam, was struck down long before his normally expected lifespan.

Little did I know just how often "Adagio" has been used, however. On film, it has been seen in David Lynch’s The Elephant Man (1980), Lorenzo’s Oil (1993), and, in 1974, applied to characters reflecting Barber's own situation, the gay-themed A Very Natural Thing.

But, according to an excellent article by Thomas Larson, this “pieta of music” first came to prominence when the news broke on April 12, 1945, that Franklin Roosevelt had died. That evening, programmers at WGN in Chicago and ABC and NBC in New York, were, unbeknownst to one another, turning to a composition that had been first performed by Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony in 1938: “Adagio.”

(Incidentally, Larson’s full-length exploration of Barber’s masterpiece, the book The Saddest Music Ever Written: The Story of Samuel Barber's "Adagio for Strings", will be published this fall by Pegasus Books.)

“Adagio” has become even more familiar over the last three decades, because it has been played at the funerals of Princess Grace of Monaco; her husband, Prince Rainier; and many of the 9/11 victims.

“Adagio” sounds like the work of a middle-aged man bearing a staggering load of sorrow. It was, in fact, written by Barber at age 26, in sunny Italy, in the early years of his personal and professional relationship with the librettist Gian Carlo Menotti. Its spirit might have been more understandable if it had been created even three years later, as Barber’s "Violin Concerto" had been, just as war began to rage over the European continent again after 20 years.

Johanna Keller’s retrospective in Sunday’s New York Times on “arguably the most often-heard work of classical music written in the last century” goes at welcome length into discussing the composition’s many permutations (including, most recently, by pop musicians and remix artists).

It makes, however, a curious omission, not discussing the Times’ own part in an intensive musical row that broke out in its pages between Barber and Ashley Pettis of the Federal Music Project. The latter scorned Barber’s "Adagio" as “ ‘authentic,’ dull, ‘serious’ music—utterly anachronistic as the utterance of a young man of 28, A.D. 1938!”

Aaron Copland, among others, was crucial in championing Barber’s work against critics such as Pettis. Over time, it has assumed an honored place in the classical canon.

The success and controversy surrounding “Adagio” annoyed the sometimes prickly Barber. He had a lot to be bothered about in the last 20 years of his life: critics’ increasing marginalization of his work after the disastrous opening for Antony and Cleopatra, the first opera commissioned by the Met for its new home in Lincoln Center in 1966; their growing criticism that he’d published nothing of note since his thirties; and the popular focus on “Adagio” to the near-exclusion of his other work. He even requested that “Adagio” not be performed at his own funeral (a wish that was disregarded).

Nevertheless, “Adagio” has managed to wend its way indelibly into the modern consciousness. It is the anthem of existential endurance in the face of what seems unbearable—an appropriate dirge for an era of mounting universal horror that manifests itself in a million individual tragedies.