Canzonetta for Oboe and Strings
Performances: Feb 16/17, 2008

It is said that I have no style at all, but that doesn’t matter.  I just go on doing, as they say, my thing.  I believe this takes a certain courage. –Samuel Barber.

In the 1930s, when Samuel Barber (1910-1981) was being lauded in some quarters as one of the most talented American composers of his generation, the modernists in academic circles lambasted his music.  Totally unaffected, Barber went on writing in his neo-Romantic vein.

An excellent baritone, Barber studied at the Curtis Institute and concentrated on singing.  He composed as a sideline, but composition quickly took over as luminaries like Vaughan Williams recognized his early works.  After Toscanini conducted his Adagio for Strings in 1938, Barber never looked back.  He would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize for his opera Vanessa (1958) and for his Piano Concerto (1962).  The bubble burst, however, with the failure of Barber’s biggest work of the 1960s, the full-scale Shakespearean opera Antony and Cleopatra.  The opera was revised by Barber’s lifelong companion, Gian Carlo Menotti, and restaged in 1975, but still didn’t find an audience.  Barber had a spate of commissions in the early 1970s, but his writing tailed off at the close of the decade, due in no small part to the cancer that was to end his life.

As Barber was dying, he was scrambling to finish a concerto for oboe and orchestra at the request of Harold Gomberg, oboist for the New York Philharmonic.  Barber soon realized he would not complete a full concerto and opted for a single movement, his Canzonetta for Oboe and Strings.  Sadly, he didn’t live quite long enough to finish the single movement, sketching the major ideas of the work and leaving his student, Charles Turner, to settle the final details.  The Canzonetta has the haunting presence of an elegy.  The harmonies, typical of Barber, range from the late Romantic to more modern sounds, while the oboe lines are distinctly vocal—a remembrance of Barber’s early days as a professional vocalist and his lifelong dedication to vocal composition.  Like Bach, who set aside his Art of the Fugue in his dying moments to write his final chorale prelude, Vor deinen Thron tret’ ich hiermit, Barber’s Canzonetta is a final offering of his deepest musical soul—beautiful, quiet, and resolute.