Music-making was always a part of Samuel Barber's life, from his earliest years. The nephew of contralto Louise Homer and her husband, the prolific song writer Sidney Homer, Barber had announced his vocation in a note written to his mother at the age of nine:

"I was meant to be a composer and will be I'm sure...Don't ask me to try to forget this unpleasant thing and go play football--please."

Barber composed a wide range of stage, orchestral, chamber, piano, choral, and vocal works in what he unassumingly insisted was a personal style "born of what I feel..I am not a self-conscious composer." His discipline and use of traditional forms earned him the reputation of a classicist. Virgil Thomson once wrote that Barber was laying to rest the ghost of Romanticism without violence, though in light of the composer's lush lyricism, deft dramatic sense, and inclination toward Romantic poetic sources (especially in his vocal writing), this comment ultimately proved to be off-mark. Throughout his catalogue of works, Barber adhered stubbornly to his own inner voice--a voice rich in subtlety and sumptuousness that relied deeply on melody, polyphony, and complex musical textures--all fused with an unerring instinct for graceful proportion and an unabashed affinity for Romantic thought and emotion.

His symphonic catalogue abounds in exquisitely crafted, yet deeply emotive, works, among them the lyrical 1933 MUSIC FOR A SCENE FROM SHELLY, Symphony No. 1 (1936), the ADAGIO FOR STRINGS (1938), and his CELLO CONCERTO, OPUS 22 (1945), to name but a few. His works for the stage include the Martha Graham ballet, MEDEA, the chamber opera A HAND OF BRIDGE, and his two full scale operas, VANESSA (1958) and ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA (1966). Despite the fact that the Shakespeare work which opened the new Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center was subjected to critical scorn, its failure was due less to Barber and far more to the overblown technical disaster created by stage designer Franco Zefferelli. Though a revised version presented by the Juilliard School in 1975 and a recent production by the Chicago Lyric Opera have gone a long way in reappraising Barber's score, the composer himself, devastated by the initial response, never fully recovered from the depression that followed. In addition to his symphonic compositions, Barber showed a particular flair in writing for both the piano and the voice. From the Brahmsian lyricism of his INTERLUDE NO.1, composed in his Curtis days and premiered only fifty years later by John Browning, to the virtuosic, passionate, and compelling PIANO SONATA, OPUS 26, to the Pulitzer Prize winning PIANO CONCERTO, OPUS 38, Barber has made landmark contributions to the keyboard repertoire.

Listen to the song, "Sure On This Shining Night" in the Songbook

While he sometimes dismissed his youthful works, Barber retained a special fondness for DOVER BEACH (1931)--perhaps because he had performed it often, himself, and had recorded it in 1935, but more likely because he found in it and in Arnold's poem of pessimism and stoic despair a renewed meaning. Almost fifty years later when the composer was seventy, he remarked on the maturity of his inspiration in DOVER BEACH and the timelessness of Arnold's text, saying that the emotions seem contemporary.
But, surely, Barber was not only speaking of the universal resonance of the work, but its personal one as well. For the man whose intensely private, reserved, urbane, and erudite exterior masked deep wellsprings of passion; for the artist whose expansiveness of feeling was always tempered by the mésure of form; for the composer whose insistence that melody and tonality fuse with modern dissonant harmonics, the artistic journey was a daunting and sometimes even depressing one.

Especially in his last decade after the initial failure of ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA, Barber had reason to feel his works neglected and his mission misunderstood.

Dover Beach
by Matthew Arnold

The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The sea of faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long withdrawing roar,
Retreating to the breath
Of the night wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.