Osborne Samuel Barber was born in 1910 in West Chester, Pennsylvania (USA). He studied at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where he met Gian Carlo Menotti (1911-2007), before becoming a student at the American Academy in Rome in 1935. The following year, Samuel Barber wrote his Quartet strings Op 11 in B minor, which he later arrange the second movement. - at the suggestion of Arturo Toscanini - for string orchestra as the Adagio for Strings and for choir under the name Agnus Dei. This movement became very popular, is used for state funerals and public memorial services in the United States since the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt. During World War II he served in the Army Air Corps, where Comandita his second symphony, "Symphony Dedicated to the Air Forces", created in early 1944 by Serge Koussevitzky at the head of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Barber revised the score in 1947, then destroyed it in 1964; it has recently been restored. The music of the maturity of Barber is particularly characterized by the use of polytonality (Symphony No. 2), of atonality ("Medea," "Prayers of Kierkegaard"), the twelve-tone ("Nocturne" Piano Sonata ) and jazz ("Excursions", "A Hand of Bridge"). He was very affected by the failure of the first, September 16, 1966, his third opera, "Antoine de Cleopatra" staged by Franco Zeffirelli, partly due to the many technical failure fiascos that peppered the show. The opera was composed for the opening of the new Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center in New York; suffering from depression, Barber lived for several years completely reclusive. He died of cancer in New York in 1981.
Among his major works, one can note a piano sonata, a sonata for violin and piano (which had received the Joseph H. Bearns Prize from Columbia University, lost partition and then destroyed by the composer), the famous String Quartet and derivatives, "Summer Music" for wind quintet, a piano concerto, a violin concerto, Concerto for cello, "Capricorn Concerto" for flute, oboe, trumpet and string orchestra, two symphonies, three "Essay for Orchestra, "" Music for a Scene from Shelley, "Overture" The School for Scandal, "Ballet" Medea, "" Prayers of Kierkegaard "for soprano, choir and orchestra, three operas," Vanessa "," A Hand of Bridge "and" Antony Cleopatra "mentioned, or many vocal works," Knoxville: Summer of 1915 "on a text by James Agee and" Dover Beach "on a text by Matthew Arnold.
