expressed interest in performing a work
by Barber despite the fact that he generally avoided contemporary music like the
plague. But Barber was by no means a
typical contemporary composer. Although
only recently graduated from Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute, he was a precocious
artist who had already found his own
creative voice: lyrical, deeply expressive,
and rooted in the harmonic language of
the late 19th century — a voice even the
conservative Toscanini could love.
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Toscanini’s selection of
both pieces for his evening
radio broadcast with the
NBC Symphony on
November 5, 1938 was
the ultimate promotional
coup for Barber’s career.
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It took Barber several years to produce
two works he thought worthy of Toscanini’s attention. His uncle, the composer
Sidney Homer, gave him excellent advice:
“The thing now is to write something for
Toscanini that expresses the depth and
sincerity of your nature. … You know as
well as I do that the Maestro loves sincere
straight-forward stuff, with genuine feeling in it and no artificial pretense and
padding.” Finally, early in 1938, Barber
sent the maestro his newly completed First
Essay for Orchestra and the Adagio for string
orchestra he had fashioned from the slow
movement of his String Quartet of 1936.
Toscanini’s selection of both pieces for
his evening radio broadcast with the NBC
Symphony on November 5, 1938 was the
ultimate promotional coup for Barber’s
career. As older audience members may
recall, the Toscanini radio concerts had a
passionate nationwide following that PBS’s
“Live from Lincoln Center” broadcasts
cannot begin to match today. By the next
morning, Samuel Barber was a household
name