Book review by Phyllis Nordstrom

Thomas Larson: “The Saddest Music Ever Written: The Story of Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings”   ISBN-10: 160598115X   ISBN-13: 978-1605981154
 Pegasus Books, New York, 2010

Since discovering Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings over a decade ago, I have listened to it every morning as a meditation of sorts. So, when I was asked to review Thomas Larson’s new book about the Adagio I eagerly accepted. The Saddest Music Ever Written: The Story of Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings is written with great compassion and earnestness. It is part biography, part music history, part musicology, and part novel. As the author says, it is an intimate history of this great work of music.

Not only does he explore the intimate biography of Barber – he includes short stories of the music’s effect on its listeners, specifically members of Larson’s family whose lives spanned the same time in American experience as Barber himself. These creative flights into personal biographies interspersed throughout the book are meant to contextualize the Adagio. The story of the saddest music ever written is not only the story of its composer, but also the story of its listeners.

Larson contends that the Adagio spoke for the great sorrow, despair and suffering, both individual and collective, of the American people during and after the Second World War. He characterizes the Adagio as an essence of the American psyche. Before this music existed there was something inexpressible in our national character. Says Alex Ross in The Rest is Noise, “Whenever the American dream suffers a catastrophic setback, Barber’s Adagio plays on the radio.” From its premiere in 1938, it has famously been used as an elegy for the dead: in 1945 for the death of Roosevelt, in 1963 for John F. Kennedy, in 1982 at the funeral of Princess Grace, and after the tragedy of 9/11.

The Adagio was one of the first works of classical music to be premiered on the radio rather than in a concert hall. Larson treats media as an important context for the Adagio. Through the medium of radio, Barber’s composition was heard by many more people than could or would have attended a formal concert. Since its premiere on radio it has evolved along with our technology, to be used prominently in movies (included in 30 soundtracks to date) and downloaded onto innumerable iPods. The ubiquity of the Adagio speaks to its universality, and its timelessness. It is the soundtrack of the soul.

Although universal, it was composed out of the psyche of a wholly 20th century temperament – a self-centered inner quest, much like the contemporaneous literature of Hermann Hesse. Larson says, “Unlike our deified ‘everyman’ American composer – Sousa…or Copland… -- Barber is the first of our lot to doggedly insist that his music be about himself. By serving himself, Barber makes his preoccupation with self-seriousness mirror our own as well.”

Throughout the book Larson tries to explain the mystery of the Adagio – how it is capable of touching the listener so deeply and so personally. His explanations are both psychological and musicological. Both are well done, but he has demonstrated once again how difficult (or impossible) it is to put words to the mystical. This is the Adagio’s inherent mystery: unmediated by words, it resonates with the state of mind of the listener. Quoting Aaron Ridley, Larson includes, “Music…grants the listener access to states of mind not otherwise available…” Larson says, “Music – and composers – also push us to experience emotions greater and higher than we have ever felt before.”

While Larson concentrates on his main premise of the sorrow evoked by the Adagio, his thesis cannot rectify a rather glaring anomaly, which he seems to miss: for all of Barber’s melancholy, and Larson makes a good case for that.  Barber wrote this particular piece of music during the one period in his life when he was ecstatically happy.

The biographical sketch of Barber is more important to understanding the motivation and intention behind the Adagio than the author, Larson himself, might realize.  Although biography is the means by which Larson tries to get at the meaning of the sorrow behind the work, Barber’s personal history actually points to the transcendence of sorrow that is what many believe is at the core of this musical experience.

While other writers have expressed this view, Larson discounts it. Dr. Beth Fleming wrote, “…that Barber regarded the Adagio differently than his audience did. She notes that ‘he viewed it not as a work to inspire mourning, but as one that illustrates the redemptive powers of inward reflection – an intimate meditation rather than an elegy.’” Larson states abruptly, “I find no evidence to back up this claim, no quotation from Barber that puts redemption above mourning.” However, Barber never spoke of mourning, either. In fact, he said very little beyond the following: “I have just finished the slow movement of my quartet today – it is a knockout!” This leaves only context to decide the case…the ecstatic, transcendent summer of 1936 during which Barber wrote the Adagio.

Larson beautifully relates the intense and intimate relationship between Barber and Gian Carlo Menotti. Having met as teenagers at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, they were inseparable throughout most of their lives. “…The young, handsome and productive duo, barely twenty years old, ‘moved easily and with panache among artists, intellectuals and high society.’” In the summer of 1936 the two rented a chalet outside of Salzburg, Austria, at the foot of a mountain, next to a scenic stream. “They ordered two pianos, one for the chalet, and the other for the woodshed nearby.” Menotti wrote, “We were so happy! Sam took the woodshed, and it was there he wrote his Adagio for Strings.” Larson tells of a photograph of Menotti and Barber taken that summer, clearly showing their exuberance. Larson says of the photo, “Their youthful vigor is irrepressible. But wait. Barber is about to pen the saddest music ever written. And yet judging by …the pair’s ‘loving friendship’ as well as by the boyishly exuberant letters Barber wrote to his parents that year, how are we to square this sunny photo and the music’s angst?” We can’t. Larson can’t.

Larson’s treatment of the musicology of sadness is brilliant, and entirely accessible. He says, “Appreciate the key’s mystery, The B-flat minor, with five flats, is dark.” “Understand that the harmony contributes to the Adagio’s central conflict – it is not all about the famous melody. The harmony’s ‘should-I-stay-or-should-I-go?’ quality, its static motion, gives the piece its emotional gravitas and grounds it in the soul of the listener.” “…the silence following the F-flat chord is the real climax of the piece, perhaps the loudest moment of all.”  “The ending leaves listeners ‘longing’ for a resolution that will never come both in the music and in the sorrow they bring to the Adagio…” Larson goes beyond discussion of the Adagio and richly treats other works by Barber, thus giving greater context to the Adagio itself. (I admit that after reading the book I immediately downloaded most of Barber’s work to my iPod.)

Larson’s thesis of sorrow would make more sense if Barber had written the Adagio later in life, when sadness, grief and depression took hold of him. After collaborating with Menotti on the wildly successful opera Vanessa (Barber won a Pulitzer Prize for it in 1958), Barber’s second opera, Antony and Cleopatra in 1966, was a failure. He spent the next five years in Italy, but never recovered emotionally. In 1972 Barber and Menotti were to part ways. After suffering a stroke in 1980, Barber died in New York in January, 1981. Menotti held him in his arms as he died.

Perhaps the greatest beauty of Larson’s book is his personal contribution to the biography of Samuel Barber. Larson traveled to West Chester, PA, where Barber grew up and where he is buried, intending to visit his grave. After searching for over an hour, he finally located it…no plaque, no monument. On his right are his parents’ graves. On his left is a space reserved for Menotti. “Barber’s will ‘instructs that in the event that Menotti chooses to be buried elsewhere, a small tombstone’, bearing an inscription that acknowledges the pair shall be placed there…”

Larson found “That beside Barber there is a space made of longing. That in every life there is a space beside us made of longing.” Menotti was buried at his home in Scotland in 2007. But today there is a headstone, dedicated in October 2009, which reads: “To the memory of two friends.”

Tears are coming once again as I write of Larson’s Postlude. Why does this make me so sad? Why does this touch me so? Perhaps it is because Barber’s music is playing in the background.

©2010 Phyllis Nordstrom