Barber, Samuel: Jan 1981

Samuel Barber, 70, the composer who stepped fully formed into the front rank of American music while still a teenager at the Curtis Institute of Music, died Friday night in New York.

 

The West Chester-born and Philadelphia-trained composer had suffered from cancer for several years.

 

In more than half a century of composing, Mr. Barber won two Pulitzer Prizes and established himself as the country's preeminent composer of lyrical music.

 

He created a large body of art songs and based his operas, oratorios and orchestral music on the principle of song.

 

Mr. Barber, who was born March 9, 1910, entered the Curtis Institute's first class in 1924. At 14, he was a prodigy who sang, played the piano and composed with almost equal fluency. His Violin Sonata, composed when he was 18, won a national prize, and his Overture to The School for Scandal was premiered by the Philadelphia Orchestra and has remained in the American orchestral repertoire ever since.

 

His Violin Concerto and " Toccata Festiva" are also frequently played by orchestras here and abroad, and his Adagio for Strings is a repertory standard. His opera Vanessa was hailed as a masterpiece when it was performed at the Metropolitan Opera in 1958, but Antony and Cleopatra , the opera he was commissioned to write for the opening of the Met's new house in Lincoln Center, faded quickly into obscurity.

 

Mr. Barber's father, Samuel LeRoy Barber, was a physician in West Chester, but his aunt, Louise Homer, was a contralto with the Met. When he was 7, he went to hear her sing in Aida with Enrico Caruso, and shortly thereafter he wrote his first opera, The Rose Tree , set in Chester County with a libretto by the family's cook.

 

When he was 8, he wrote his parents, " I was meant to be a composer, and I will be, I'm sure. . . . Don't ask me to try to forget this."

 

Six years later, Mr. Barber was at Curtis, studying conducting with Fritz Reiner and composition with Rosario Scalero, whose concern with traditional structure and with 19th- century lyricism was seen by many critics as an influence on Mr. Barber's work throughout his career.

 

At Curtis, Mr. Barber met another composition student, Gian-Carlo Menotti, who had just arrived from Italy. The two lived together in the New York suburbs and were virtually inseparable for most of their creative lives. They were linked in the public mind as the modern composers who wrote melodies. But their personalities were very dissimilar. Mr. Barber was as shy, quiet and introspective as Menotti was aggressive and flamboyant. Menotti was librettist for Vanessa , but generally the two composers worked alone.

 

The two lived apart for the last 10 years.

 

Mr. Barber's career had very little struggle to it. His gifts as singer, pianist and composer were hailed almost from childhood. As a young man, people spoke of his matinee-idol good looks, and he aged elegantly into a man as polished, independent and contained as his music.

 

Mr. Barber burst onto the world music scene in 1935 and 1936, when he wrote compositions that won two Pulitzer fellowships and the American Prix de Rome.

 

In 1937, he became the first American to have his work performed at the Salzburg Festival in Austria. Arturo Toscanini, the great conductor who usually had very little patience with any composer who happened to be alive, gave Mr. Barber an important boost by performing the First Essay for Orchestra with the NBC Symphony in 1938. Toscanini then introduced Adagio for Strings the same year, and the greatest orchestras and the most eminent conductors were suddenly vying to give Mr. Barber commisions.

 

His Piano Sonata was introduced by Vladimir Horowitz. He wrote the music for Martha Graham's " Medea," one of that dancer's most famous roles. Albert Spalding and the Philadelphia Orchestra introduced the Violin Concerto, and Leontyne Price and Eleanor Steber sang his songs.

 

From 1943 to 1945, Mr. Barber served in the Army, and this too produced music, " A Stopwatch and an Ordinance Map," for men' voices and tympani, and his Second Symphony.

 

Vanessa won Mr. Barber the Pulitzer Prize for music in 1958, and his First Piano Concerto won him another Pulitzer in 1963. The only major setback of his career was Antony and Cleopatra, which aroused such scorn from critics that he gave up writing opera for the rest of his life and stopped composing at all for several years.

 

Mr. Barber taught intermittently at the Curtis Institute from the 1930s to the 1960s and was a close friend of Mary Louise Curtis Bok, the school's founder. Last March, Curtis staged a two-day festival of Mr. Barber's works, but he was too ill to attend.

 

The funeral will be at 1 p.m. Monday at the First Presbyterian Church in West Chester.

 

Tomorrow night's Curtis Institute concert has been canceled. There will be a special broadcast of Mr. Barber's music on WUHY-FM tomorrow at 8 p.m.1