National Youth Orchestra of the United States of America

Unaffected Romanticism

Given the popularity of “neo-Romantic” symphonic music, it is refreshing to come across a 20th-century piece like the Barber Violin Concerto, one where the Romanticism is authentic and unaffected. Composed in 1939, the concerto opens with two supremely lyrical movements. The first develops a long, full-throated song immediately stated by the violin and a smaller, syncopated motif that later becomes a big lyrical statement as well. The second movement features an oboe melody over muted strings that sustains and even heightens the Romantic intensity. The finale, breathtakingly fast and compact, is a sharp contrast and a showpiece for the soloist.

A “Worrying Secret”

Barber treats the instruments in the orchestra as singers. Indeed, he was first a songwriter—he began composing songs at age seven—and a skilled baritone. His parents were not musicians, but his aunt, Louise Homer, was a popular contralto at the Metropolitan Opera, and her husband, Sidney Homer, was an important song composer. His parents wanted him to play football, attend Princeton, and go to medical school, but even as a child Barber knew who he was and what he wanted to do. In a remarkable letter he wrote to his mother when he was eight or nine, he confessed his “worrying secret. Now don’t cry when you read this because it is neither yours nor my fault … I was meant to be a composer, and will be I’m sure … don’t ask me to try and forget this unpleasant thing and go and play football.”

Once out in the open, Barber’s “worrying secret” was supported by his parents; they enrolled him at age 14 in the first class at the Curtis Institute of Music, where he met Gian Carlo Menotti, who became his partner and lifelong friend. During a vacation with Menotti in 1935 in Maine, he began his First Symphony, having received a Pulitzer traveling scholarship and the Prix de Rome at the American Academy. This epic yet compact Symphony in One Movement—which features a rapturous oboe solo over muted strings anticipating the one in the Violin Concerto—was the first work by an American to appear at the Salzburg Festival, an important moment for American symphonic music, and received acclaimed performances by The Cleveland Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic.

An Odd History

Like the Symphony in One Movement, the Violin Concerto, which came three years later, is a Romantic work with “modern” moments, in this case a steely moto perpetuo finale full of dissonance and rhythmic displacement, described by Barber as “exploiting the more brilliant and virtuoso characteristics of the violin.” This finale was mainly responsible for the work’s singular, odd history. Commissioned by American businessman Samuel Fels as a vehicle for a young protege, Iso Briselli, who was in Barber’s class at Curtis, the piece was begun by Barber in Switzerland, but the outbreak of World War II forced him to return to his home in Pennsylvania. When he submitted the first two movements, he was surprised to hear that the young violinist did not consider them sufficiently “violinistic.” Barber wrote a more bravura finale, but Briselli rejected it as too short and out of sync with the first two movements. (For years, commentators believed Briselli considered it too difficult to play, but this has been debunked.) Barber, however, was happy with the piece and rejected the rejection; he even scheduled private read-throughs by other violinists, including Oscar Shumsky. The work was finally picked up by Albert Spalding, who was on the lookout for a new concerto, and he premiered it in 1941 with Eugene Ormandy and The Philadelphia Orchestra.

An Exciting Tension

To this day, some argue that the swiftness and modernity of the finale do not mesh with the lyrical rapture of what has gone before, but the truth is that Barber’s music often sustains an exciting tension between the Romantic and the modern. From the beginning, in the lyrical Symphony in One Movement, he showed he was not afraid of dissonance when he needed drama and contrast. Even the famous Adagio for Strings was originally the slow movement in an early String Quartet from 1936, full of jagged, spicy harmonies in its outer movements; and the allegedly more “modern” Piano Concerto from 1962 has a slow movement that rivals the Adagio for simple lyric inspiration. It is precisely this tension that gives Barber’s music its distinctive frisson.

Berlioz and the Gothic Tradition

If there is a Gothic horror tradition in music roughly comparable to that of literature, then Hector Berlioz is its Horace Walpole, Edgar Allan Poe, and Sheridan Le Fanu all in one. His revolutionary Symphonie fantastique, composed in 1830, not only strikes a note of satanic terror, but builds to it from a mood of deceptive, bucolic calm, and even parodies it at the end.

Berlioz’s mastery of the macabre certainly had precedents—Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Beethoven’s “Ghost” Piano Trio, Schubert’s “Erlkönig,” and others have phantasmal moments—but nothing had been heard in music that quite prepared audiences for the awesome tolling bell in the “Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath,” the startlingly realistic depiction of a head lopped off by a guillotine, the ghoulish brass intoning the Dies irae from the Mass for the Dead, or the scratchings and rumblings in the strings that forecast the special effects in composers like Penderecki, Bartók, and Takemitsu. Reviewers for Figaro and other publications called the new symphony “bizarre” and “monstrous”—and meant it as high praise. The symphony launched a tradition of terror that continued in the more spectral offerings of Liszt (who attended the 1830 premiere), Mussorgsky, and Scriabin. This intensely cinematic music has, unsurprisingly, invaded the world of film, as in the sinister opening of Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining.”

Berlioz the Revolutionary

Berlioz’s influence and forward-looking insistence on sound for the sake of sound extend far beyond musical Gothicism. His imprint is everywhere in the 19th century and beyond—indeed, many regard him as the father of the modern symphony—but what imprinted him is less clear. He greatly admired Beethoven and Gluck, but his originality seemed to come out of nowhere; the hallucinatory colors in works like the Symphonie fantastique and Roméo et Juliette are certainly not based on 19th-century models. According to Romain Rolland, Berlioz’s conservatory mentors “taught him nothing in point of instrumentation … Berlioz taught himself. He used to read the score of an opera while it was being performed.”

Music of Morbid Sensibility

Berlioz’s idea of musical narrative was not based on classical models either. A depiction of opium hallucination and romantic obsession, the Symphonie fantastique has a program explicated in an elaborate appendage to the first performance: “A young musician of morbid sensibility and ardent imagination takes opium in a fit of despair over his love, and dreams of his beloved, who has become for him a melody, like a fixed idea, which he finds and hears everywhere.” This idée fixe, the musical equivalent of an obsession, blooms lyrically in the opening “Daydreams, Passions,” then returns in ghostly fragments to haunt “A Ball” and “Scene in the Country.” In the sensational final movements, dream turns into nightmare: The tormented lover “dreams that he has killed his beloved,” and in the “March to the Scaffold” imagines himself “led to execution” to a march “somber and wild … At the end, the idée fixe appears for an instant, like a last thought interrupted by the fatal stroke.”

Finally, in the notorious “Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath,” the lover “envisions himself in the midst of a frightful group of ghosts, magicians, and monsters … He hears strange noises, groans, ringing laughter.” The ghost of the beloved participates in “the diabolic orgy,” her “beloved melody” parodied as an “ignoble, trivial, and grotesque dance tune.” At the end, the witches’ dance combines with the Dies irae in music of demonic energy.

Heroines Real and Fantastic

Berlioz never meant for the program to be taken literally and asked that the audience only be shown the descriptive titles of the movements. The heroine is not real, but a ghostly obsession based on someone real—like Poe’s “Morella” or Hitchcock’s fantasy heroine in Vertigo—so that her murder and resurrection are bound up with the narrator’s tormented psyche. Berlioz, as secular an artist as Poe, was more interested in the psychological than the fantastic.

His own obsession with actress Harriet Smithson was the background. The symphony was “the history of my own love for Miss Smithson, my anguish and my distressing dream,” but it was a depiction of awakening passion, not literal autobiography. As Jacques Barzun points out, Berlioz had never taken Smithson “to a ball, never been with her in the country—much less a public execution: He hardly knew her at all except across the footlights.”

The symphony was part of an elaborate seduction stratagem, an attempt to make fantasy real. Berlioz did succeed in marrying Smithson, but when the marriage dissolved into acrimony and alcohol, the grim ending of the symphony turned out to have an ironic appropriateness. Reality won over fantasy after all.