- Born
- 9 March 1910West Chester, Pennsylvania, USA
- Died
- 23 January 1981New York City, USA · aged 70
Samuel Barber
The composer of the “Adagio for Strings” shared his life for over forty years with the composer Gian Carlo Menotti.
Samuel Barber grew up in a well-off family in Pennsylvania. At nine he wrote to his mother that he was meant to be a composer, “not an athlete”. At 14 he began studying at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where in 1928 he met the young Italian composer Gian Carlo Menotti.
The two became a couple and remained partners for more than forty years. In 1943 they bought a house together near New York, which they named “Capricorn” and where they composed side by side. Menotti wrote the libretto for Barber’s opera “Vanessa” (1958), which won the Pulitzer Prize.
Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” (1936), premiered by Arturo Toscanini, became one of the best-known pieces of American music; it was played at the funerals of presidents and in countless films. Barber wrote in a lyrical, late-Romantic style, including songs, concertos and the opera “Antony and Cleopatra”, with which the new Metropolitan Opera House opened in 1966.
The failure of that opera hit him hard, and his relationship with Menotti ended in the 1970s, though they remained close. Barber died in New York in 1981, aged 70.