Music Director
Samuel Barber (1910-1981)
Toccata Festiva for Organ and Orchestra, Op. 36
American composer Samuel Barber was born in 1910, at a time when composers were experimenting with revolutionary techniques in response to the near exhaustion of tonality-driven forms. Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern developed twelve-tone techniques in an attempt to avoid tonality altogether. Stravinsky and Debussy used chords in non-functional ways for color effects. By the middle of the century, music become more mathematical, electronic, and intellectually dense.
It is all the more remarkable that Barber ‘s deeply emotional Adagio for Strings (1938), a string orchestra version of a movement from Barber’s String Quartet, Op. 11), became one of the most famous classical works of the twentieth century. The work was played at the funerals of F.D.R., J.F.K., and Princess Grace. The Adagio was also used effectively in Oliver Stone’s Vietnam War film, Platoon (1986), and in Stone’s film J.F.K. (1991).
Samuel Barber was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania and studied piano. In 1924, at fourteen, he went to the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia to study piano, voice, conducting and composition. He received the Prix de Rome in 1935, Pulitzer Traveling Scholarships in 1935 and 1936, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1945.
Barber’s works include violin, cello, and piano concertos, two symphonies, and the ballet Medea for American dancer Martha Graham. His first opera, Vanessa, with a libretto by Barber’s friend Gian Carlo Menotti, won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 1958. He won a second Pulitzer in 1963 for the Piano Concerto No. 1. Antony and Cleopatra, Barber’s second opera, was commissioned for the opening of the Metropolitan Opera’s new Opera House at Lincoln Center in 1966.
Samuel Barber composed the Toccata Festiva in 1960. It was first performed on September 30, 1960 by the Philadelphia Orchestra under the direction of Eugene Ormandy, with Paul Calloway playing the organ. In this work, Barber continues the centuries old improvisational toccata form that was popular with Baroque composers like Bach and Frescobaldi.
Program notes by Beth Bergman Fisher