Samuel Barber’s most famous piece likely holds the title of “Saddest Piece of Music Ever Written”. It has become the default piece of music to play at sombre occasions. Here’s a partial list of occasions for which it has served as the soundtrack:
- Played on the radio at the announcement of FDR’s death
- National radio broadcast following JFK’s funeral
- At the funeral of Albert Einstein
- At the BBC Proms in 2001 to honour the victims of 9/11
- At the BBC Proms in 2021 to honour the victims of 9/11 twenty years later
- In Central Park in 2015 to honour the victims of the Orlando night club shooting
- At a livestreamed socially-distanced concert in 2020 by the Berlin Philharmonic to honour the victims of COVID
In other words, if someone’s died – or even better, if a whole bunch of people have died – it’s time to cue up the Samuel Barber.
Maybe this is why it’s taken me so long to include the song on this list; it’s so ubiquitous that I can’t help but think of it as a Hallmark-like token expression of sadness.
But then something happened last week: I saw the piece performed live, not by an orchestra but by a string quartet. I’m not sure I’d ever heard it performed by a quartet before, and it made for a very different experience of the music. Rather than enormous and schmaltzy, it felt intimate and understated. The setting of the performance, a converted barn with string lights overhead and a large glass wall on one side, may have had something to do with it as well.
Just before the performance began, the rain was battering the barn’s steel roof so hard that it seemed as if the organizers were trying to figure out a way to delay the concert. But then the rain suddenly let up, everyone breathed a sigh of relief, and the performance began.
As the opening notes of the Adagio began, the sun broke through the clouds and streamed through the glass wall on one side of the barn.
I stopped hearing Barber’s famous piece as mournful and heard it instead as hopeful.
Tinged with a slight nostalgia, perhaps, but definitely hopeful.
What makes this a beautiful song:
1. The way it fades in on an indecisive chord, as if you’ve walked in on a performance already in progress.
2. The way it builds to a screaming climax at 5:00.
3. The way it rebounds from that climax with a calm resolution that somehow doesn’t ever quite resolve.
Recommended listening activity:
Going for a walk shortly after a heavy rain.