Samuel Barber's concerto and the 1930s
I am not the first person to have noticed that the 1930s were an incredibly fertile time for the violin concerto; it seems to have thrived on the uncertainty of the age. Composers trusted their love songs and rages, anxieties - prophecies even - to this medium. The frail wooden box we know as the violin came to represent the solitary voice pitted against a mass of instrumental force, and somehow became the lightening conductor for the age: an individual soul singing its heart out under threat of annihilation from inexorable brutality.
It is tempting to see this image in the final pages of the Britten concerto of 1939. To hear it now, in the knowledge of how events were to unfold, can be a deeply moving experience. It was written by a young man, politically naïve perhaps, but already convinced of his pacifism; written too, away from home, in America, the place most obstinately indifferent to Europe’s relentless slide towards war.
This displacement is also part of the context of at least two other violin concertos of the time; Bartok’s (1937/8) and Schoenberg’s (1936). Perhaps the Bartok can be viewed as a sort of farewell to Europe. Totally disenchanted with the turn of events in Hungary and convinced that escape was imperative, the writing of the concerto and its premiere were enmeshed in agony; when to leave (an ailing mother not fit enough to travel), where to go, a poisonous business with his publisher.
Nevertheless, the premiere, on March 23rd 1939, in Amsterdam, was a success. (That day in Amsterdam did one put down the newspaper in the hope of taking a break from world events for a little while? What can it have felt like sitting there listening to this astounding and frightening revelation as it emerged for the first time? The most poignant account of the subsequent years was related to me by a wonderful amateur cellist; a Dutch Jew with whom, whilst a student, I used to play quartets regularly. He told me of his war in Amsterdam, hiding in a cupboard waiting hour by hour for the Nazis to come. They didn't; he survived. With him I played for the first time most of the string quartet literature; except movingly and pathetically one work - Haydn's Emperor Quartet - whose second movement theme was for him so soiled by its Nazi appropriation that it had become unbearable to hear or to play. Touchingly, he felt this was his problem, but one he lacked the courage to face.)
The violin concerto (1936) was among the first of Schoenberg’s works to be written in America. Schoenberg seems to have known sooner than most exactly where the policies of the Nazis were heading. He actually sat at the faculty meeting of the Prussian Academy in Berlin when the new non-Aryan policy was read out; not wasting a minute, he resigned his position immediately and left for Paris, from where he and his family made their way to the USA. He returned to the Jewish faith and devoted much time and energy to simply getting people out of mortal danger. Perhaps his concerto is the ultimate example of the form in terms of extremity of expression. It is beginning to be heard more often now and thus its extraordinary world is a little more available to us.
Then there are love-songs. The Berg (1935), written in Vienna and whose coded autobiography is now more clearly inpicked; the Walton (1939) with its set of parts somewhere now at the bottom of the Atlantic, before a new set made it across the ocean in time for a premiere in the USA. The war again interfered with the work’s British premiere in Oxford when an air-raid in London prevented the material from arriving in time. Poor Walton sat through a hastily-substituted performance of the Brahms concerto only able to console himself by drinking himself into a stupor.
But where is the authentic voice of America, then hosting so many of Europe’s refugees?
Perhaps the answer lies with this concerto of Samuel Barber. Here, in the first movement, is a shining beacon of hope, humility, freshness and honest vigour. (I can’t think of any other music which quite encapsulates “hope” as the music between figures 9 and 10 in the first movement.) The work of a young man still on the outward trajectory of his talent, there is such ease in the writing and certainty of gesture. No verbosity or rhetoric here, yet the concerto’s statements are big and everything tells. The first entry, a melody of some 24 bars, is so natural that its daring is scarcely even noticed; no preamble, just concentrated intention and meaning. Conversely, how risky to have a soloist silent for such a long time at the second movement’s outset.
To Europe, it shines back a clear, truthful and curiously unafraid light. Its flavour is of clean air and healthy milk. Yet at the heart of the fragile and confessional middle movement an entirely different mood is evident; one of intense introspection and longing.
Subsequently, things did not always prove so straightforward for the composer of this disarming masterpiece. Like Walton, his fluency gradually ran down to a trickle and again like Walton he seemed never to fully recover from the reception given to a work long-planned as a crowning achievement – for Walton’s “Troilus and Cressida” read Barber’s “Anthony and Cleopatra”.
I have a colleague in London who whilst a student at Curtis in the early '80s played at Barber’s funeral. He spoke of Menotti’s inconsolability; Menotti and Barber had been lifelong partners. The work was “Dover Beach” for baritone and string quartet and was written a little earlier than the violin concerto.
The words to Dover Beach are by the English poet Mathew Arnold (1822-1888) and contain this espousal of an artistic life so strangely apposite to the 1930s.
"Ah, love, let us be true
To one another!
For the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night."