I bought this over a year ago and never got around to watching it until last weekend. I wasn't very familiar with Barber's work (or his life, for that matter) and always found other DVDs to watch instead of this one, from opera productions and documentaries about other artists to multiple versions of the Anna Karenina mini-seriesand blockbuster movies I didn't catch when they were playing in theaters. Now I wish I had paid attention to Barber earlier.
I remember enjoying the opera documentary The Opera House about the reopening of Lincoln Center in 1965 with a brand new opera Antony and Cleopatra conducted by Thomas Schippers. Schippers once was a rising star at the Metropolitan Opera and ended his career at the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra before his untimely death of lung cancer at age 47 (his life was also rather unhappy because he had to hide his homosexuality, you can read the blog post I wrote about Schippers here).
In fact I wrote this blog post around the same time I purchased Samuel Barber: Absolute Beauty so I must have been interested in learning more about Antony and Cleopatra's author, but when I started watching Absolute Beauty a few days ago I had completely forgotten he had authored what is now considered as an epic dud, although the documentary makes a good case the responsibility for the highly-publicized failure falls squarely on the shoulder of director Franco Zeffirelli, who doomed the production with his grandiose staging(Leontyne Pryce got stuck in a pyramid on opening night but kept singing) rather than due to a flaw of the opera itself. The documentary also argues that the opera got bad press because the media was out to get Barber after many years of unmitigated success, and he never wrote anything substantial after that.
Samuel Barber had a long-term relationship with Gian-Carlo Menotti, who also has a long-term relationship with Schippers. This might have been why the Menotti name sounded familiar, as I haven't seen any of the operas he composed. Barber and Menotti ultimately separated (Menotti was drawn to younger men, including Schippers), which forced Barber to sell the beloved home they had shared in the country and return to New York City, which made him ill at ease. In the end Menotti is only a footnote to history and Schippers hasn't fared that much better (although the recording I have of his conducting documents his talent) but Barber's music continues to awe audiences. Just the other day I witnessed a magnificent performance of his piano concerto by none other than Garrick Ohlsson, whose interpretation of Brahms I adore.
Of course, me being me, I had to compensate my long neglect of Barber by sudden, extensive interest in his life and work. It helped that the documentary was fascinating, with plenty of documents of the time such as photographs and insightful interviews of music experts ranging from Leonard Slatkin to Barber biographer Barbara Heyman. Perhaps it was fortunate that I didn't watch the Barber documentary back in November 2018 when I first purchased, as I would probably have purchased the first edition of Barber's bio at the time, but a second edition was published just last month, building upon new archival documents. Just to finish talking about the documentary, the first half is mostly spent talking about his music (starting with the song cycle Dover Beach but also commenting on his best-known work Adagio for Strings), showing musicians rehearsing his music, recording them discuss his music. It was very insightful. At the halfway point, the focus shifts and starts including more details on Barber's personal life. I found it fascinating how every music critic pilloried him when Antony and Cleopatra failed in spectacular fashion, as if they had all wanted to cut him down to size. I also enjoyed the insight of his biographer Barbara Heyman, based on a note of his that she found, that he was as modernist as he could get away with it, without sacrificing tonality and basically audience appeal (which does not mean his work is easy listening fare, because it definitely is not, but it is nice not to have to listen to Schoenberg-like atonal works.) I also liked her comment that he only wrote one of everything (one violin concerto, one piano concerto, etc) because he felt he had said exactly all that he wanted to say using that instrument in his first try. Heyman came across as extremely knowledgeable about Barber.
So I bought 4 CDs of Barber and his bio. (I wasn't kidding when I was writing about my sudden extensive interest...) The bio arrived a few days ago, it is a superb book of high quality with reproductions of part of Barber's scores. I can't wait to delve into it. The Barber recording by the London Symphony Orchestra is also excellent, the violin concerto in particular took my breath away. As for the other recordings, they just arrived and so I haven't had a chance to decide what I think about them yet, but I love having multiple recordings of the same piece to listen to the nuances brought in by each conductor and compare them. Thirty-nine years after his death, Barber remains a giant of American music and the documentary Samuel Barber: Absolute Beauty is a valuable companion to anyone interested in learning more about his talent.
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