Classical Music | Violin Music

Recorded on 07/12/2009, uploaded on 11/10/2011

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

Samuel Barber composed only a single string quartet. While a curious piece in the composer’s oeuvre, mostly because of its initial departure from the emotionally-charged lyricism one expects of Barber’s music, it is not particularly one of its highlights. Though it may not live up to the standards of his other works, the fate of the String Quartet, op. 11 was largely brought about by Barber’s own arrangement of the quartet’s slow movement—the famous Adagio—for string orchestra, and in whose shadow the remainder of the work has been destined to exist.

The Quartet was begun in 1935 while Barber was living in Austria. Initially, Barber intended the work to be premiered by the Curtis Quartet. On September 19, he wrote to his friend and the quartet’s cellist, Orlando Cole, that he had just completed the Adagio movement, and expressed great confidence in its merit. Barber, however, failed to finish the work before the Curtis Quartet went on tour, and its premiere was instead given by the Pro Arte Quartet on December 14, 1936 at the American Academy in Rome.

In its original form, as performed by Pro Arte, the Quartet consisted of three movements. The first departed from Barber’s usual lyricism, and in a loosely constructed sonata form, ventured into a realm more akin to the motivic development found in Beethoven’s music. The Adagio second movement was then framed on the other side by a contrapuntal finale. While the famous Adagio was indeed a rare gem, and would take on a life all its own in the string orchestra arrangement produced that same year, the outer movements were extensively revised before the work’s eventual publication. When it finally took its ultimate form, Barber had stripped the original finale, and replaced it with a cyclical, though somewhat anticlimactic, recapitulation of the first movement’s material.      Joseph DuBose

The Steans Music Institute is the Ravinia Festival's professional studies program for young musicians.