Kirjahaku

Samuel Barber (1910-1981) is one of the most admired and honored American composers of the twentieth century. An unabashed Romantic, largely independent of worldwide trends and the avant-garde, he infused his works with poetic lyricism and gave tonal language and forms new vitality. His rich legacy includes every genre, including the famous Adagio for Strings, Knoxville: Summer of 1915, three concertos, a plethora of songs, and two operas, the Pulitzer prize-winning Vanessa, and Antony and Cleopatra, the commissioned work that opened the new Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center in 1966. Generously documented by letter, sketches, autograph manuscripts, and interviews with friends, colleagues, and performers with whom he worked, this ASCAP-Award winning book is still unquestionably the most authoritative biography on Barber, covering his entire career and interweaving the events of his life with his compositional process. This second edition benefits from many new discoveries, including a Violin Sonata recovered from an artist's estate, a diary Barber kept his seventeenth year, a trove of letters and manuscripts that were recovered from a suitcase found in a dumpster, documentation that dispels earlier myths about the composition of Barber's Violin Concerto, and research of scholars that was stimulated by Heyman's work. Barber's intimate relations are discussed when they bear on his creativity. A testament to the lasting significance of Romanticism, Samuel Barber stands as a model biography of an important musical figure.

Samuel Barber (1910-1981) was one of the most important and honoured American composers of the twentieth century. Writing in a great variety of musical forms — symphonies, concertos, operas, vocal music, chamber music — he infused his works with poetic lyricism and gave tonal language and forms new vitality. His rich legacy includes such famous compositions as the Adagio for Strings, the orchestral song Knoxville: Summer of 1915, three concertos, and his two operas, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Vanessa and Antony and Cleopatra, a commissioned work that opened the new Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center. Generously documented by letters, sketchbooks, original musical manuscripts, and interviews with friends, colleagues and performers with whom he worked, this is the first book to cover Barber's entire career and all of his compositions. The biographical material on Barber is closely interspersed with a discussion of his music, displaying Barber's creative processes at work from his early student compositions to his mature masterpieces. Heyman also provides the social context in which this major composer grew: his education, how he built his career, the evolving musical tastes of American audiences, his relationship to musical giants like Serge Koussevitzky, and the role of radio in the promotion of his music. A testament to the significance of the new Romanticism, Samuel Barber stands as a model biography of an important American musical figure.