Biographie de Samuel Barber (document en anglais)

Samuel Barber (1910-1981) is not widely regarded as an innovative composer of songs. His music is considered to be an extension of the Romantic era, blending Romantic sonorities and lyricism in traditional forms with certain elements of modernity. Like Brahms, Barber maintained his distance from shifting innovations in music and retained a musical language derived from earlier periods, demonstrating that this font of musical language had yet to be exhausted. Even though Barber was not particularly innovative, he did develop a personal style in his songs, leaving the question: what were Barber’s innate talents and what were the external exposures that worked together to form his personal voice as a song composer?

Composers develop and personalize their compositional characteristics through a combination of inborn ability and education. Exposure to various repertoire and instruction creates an amalgamation, distillation, and reproduction of musical and, even, life experiences. Composers meld this into something that history later recognizes as the composer’s “voice.” It is easy to label a well-known composer’s “voice” as original without acknowledging that he or she may have absorbed compositional techniques from lesser-known composers whose compositional output may lie outside the mainstream classical repertoire. It is also easy to assign a young composer’s influences to the repertoire of only the great composers taught in conservatories. Thus, the influence of a forgotten or lesser-known composer or harmony instructor may never receive proper recognition. After all, the young composer is extremely impressionable. When looking at composers’ juvenilia and early compositions, it is likely that they have had limited exposure to the vast amount of western music available. Therefore, the bulk of their experimental compositions are based on a certain degree of mimicry combined with a natural sense of originality. That same combination often exists in the creative recesses of a mature composer’s compositional palette.

Today, Rosario Scalero, Barber’s composition professor at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute is recognized as the teacher that molded Samuel Barber into one of the most popular classical composers of the 20th century. However, in order to arrive at a true picture of Barber’s development (especially his roots as a song composer) one must begin at the start of his exposure to music. Since songs are a marriage of music and text, it is logical that one must also examine Barber’s exposure to all things literary. Barber’s earliest contact with music and literature prove to be vital to the development of his tastes as a song composer. Song composition is one of the first genres in which Barber attempts to express himself. Barber’s musically inclined relatives and his first music instructors helped him to construct his earliest musical identity. These mentors took on the responsibility of molding and guiding the raw natural talent of this brightly gifted child.

Investigating Barber’s earliest song compositions and highlighting Barber’s interactions with his childhood influences will allow for a more detailed account of his development as a song composer. Furthermore, a study of these early influences and characteristics that took root before Barber’s work with Rosario Scalero, his composition professor at Curtis, may illuminate the sources of many of the compositional choices in his mature songs. Barber’s earliest musical and literary influences are made manifest in his juvenile song output. In these songs one can observe Barber’s innate ability to successfully mimic and synthesize the conventional techniques of the 19th century Lieder tradition and the “sentimental” parlor song tradition of the early 20th century, an important stage in Barber’s path towards developing his own mature voice as a song composer. An examination of the poetry that Barber chose to set (mostly British) also reveals a trend that would follow in his more mature works.

Out of the approximately fifty solo songs composed between 1917 (Barber’s first extant song) and 1928 (the end of what I this author considers Barber’s “juvenilia song period”), only twenty have been edited and published by Barber’s exclusive publishing company, G.S. Schirmer, Inc. To date, eight of these songs, composed in 1927, have not been located. Only two songs were published in his lifetime, “The Daisies” and “With rue my heart is laden.” Both were written in 1927 and later published in 1936 as the first two selections of Three Songs (Op. 2). Eighteen additional songs have been published posthumously by G. Schirmer: two songs in 1994’s Samuel Barber: Ten Early Songs, two more in 2008’s Samuel Barber: Ten Selected Songs, and another sixteen songs in 2010’s Samuel Barber: 65 Songs.

With G. Schirmer’s recent publication, many of the more substantial early songs are now widely distributed and have become an important and easily accessible addition to the American art song repertoire. Beyond the musicological benefit of tracing the development of Barber’s song style through these little-known early songs, many will find them to be charming and aesthetically worthy of performance and study. These songs provide young students with an introduction to Barber’s musical language, preparing them for his more vocally advanced and musically complicated songs. Many of these early songs also hold artistic merit for professionals, as they did in Barber’s day when his aunt Louise Homer, the celebrated Metropolitan Opera singer, performed some of them in recitals across the country.

Using existing and new biographical data, as well as the published and unpublished song juvenilia, this document will examine

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