2 - Reception in England

Summary

The prolific American writer David Ewen, writing for a British public in the Musical Times in 1939, found Roy Harris “the most significant” among American composers but continued: “Samuel Barber promises to become the most important discovery since Harris.” Ewen heard Barber's First Symphony at the Salzburg Festival in 1937 where it was followed by an ovation. He went on prophetically in terms rarely used by any British writer then or later: “Samuel Barber's facility in self-expression, his extraordinary gift in formulating his copious ideas into a coherent and integrated pattern … his capacity for writing a line of melody, and his instinct for harmony and orchestration bespeak a formidable creative talent… . Samuel Barber is already a fine and original composer: there is every reason to believe he may ultimately develop into a great one.”

Harris has not stood the test of time, but the adulation accorded to Barber in America came early and was sustained, apart from a reaction that became perceptible in the 1960s. By looking at Barber's exposure in London, we see how his music gradually made its way in a major cultural capital outside the United States without the assumptions of genius common on its home ground.

The first hearing of his music in London was with a group of young musicians from the Curtis Institute, including the Curtis Quartet, sponsored by the Philadelphia branch of the English-Speaking Union in June 1935. They gave three concerts of American music, the first at Lady Astor's house in St. James's Square that included the Serenade, op. 1, for string quartet, Dover Beach, and four other songs. Barber told his parents: “Lady Astor went behind the scenes during the concert and complimented my music by asking if I was dead yet!” The next time Barber's music was heard in London seems to have been when the Curtis Quartet played the Serenade at the Aeolian Hall on November 25, 1936. The Timesmerely referred to “a rhapsodical serenade by Samuel Barber and … Turina's La Oracion del torero—neither of them a work of great moment.” The following year Felix Salmond included Barber's Cello Sonata in his Wigmore Hall recital on June 21 with the composer at the piano; this performance was announced in The Times but may not have been reviewed.