What is the purpose of music? The question applies to both listeners and creators. What do you come to music for, what’s the goal of settling in to listen or to make music?
No doubt it’s not for one reason alone; there’s almost never only one reason for anything we do or think in life. That’s partly the basis for the tremendous variety of musical genres, instruments, venues and performers we have available to us in the sprawling firmament that music has become since early humans started to explore and appreciate sound for sound’s sake, rather than as simply an aural feature of the natural world they found themselves in.
In its totality, music can reflect, shape, challenge, argue, revise and enhance our understanding of ourselves, our relationships with one another, and with whatever sense of the sacred we adopt or devise for ourselves in the equally sprawling firmament of spirituality.
Music can alternately soothe, inspire, provoke and electrify, make us think and go beyond thinking into pure, unbridled, even ecstatic emotion. It can goad us to action and lullaby us into blissful inaction.
It is not for nothing that music most always accompanies our grandest ceremonies, from birthdays to weddings to funerals to inaugurations to the bugle corps and drums marching us off to war. Music that fits these occasions ennobles us as individuals and connects us to our fellow humans, sometimes stopping us in our tracks, other times dropping us to our knees as we are struck with the raw beauty and true depth of the creation, and the birthing, living and dying we do within it.
The 56th song in this series exemplifies this beauty and depth as few others before or since. Then down below, we’ll drop in on an electrified and ecstatic remake, notable for its creator’s imaginative leap in grasping the song’s possibilities in a dramatically alternative form.
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You may think you’re unfamiliar with Samuel Barber’s “Agnus Dei,” but I’m almost certain you’ll experience an “Aha!” moment when the melody reveals itself in the first few bars. Barber transcribed the piece for voice from the second movement, “Adagio for Strings,” of his “String Quartet, Opus 11,” which he composed in 1936.
The “Adagio,” which translates to “at ease” in Italian and “slowly” for musical purposes, has long since gone on to become famous in its own right, a concert staple around the world that far overshadows not only the concerto from which it is drawn, but also most of Barber’s other, highly regarded work.
It’s a prayer of calming and plaintive supplication, a treasured ritual among Catholics, but for my money, Barber could have as easily read off a household grocery list without losing the piece’s ravishing sense of beauty…
With its solemn, achingly slow and contemplative expressiveness, the “Adagio” provided the funeral music for both Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy, cementing itself ever since as a kind of national secularized music of mourning. It was later reprised in film scores for “The Elephant Man” (1980) and “Platoon” (1986), and more recently still in multiple 9/11 memorial events over the years.
Unlike, say, Bobby McFerrin, who has to suppress an impulse to flee from the stage every time an audience member pipes up with, “How about ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy?'”, Barber always felt a strong kinship and love for his “Adagio,” written when he was a mere 26 years old. Even then, modest, and courtly man that he was and subject to periodic bouts of depression, he described it to intimates of the time as a “knock-out,” as it surely was and remains.
Thirty-one years later, he reworked the score for a chorus, borrowing the title “Agnus Dei” (“Lamb of God”) from the Catholic spiritual tradition’s eucharistic prayer. Raised nominally Presbyterian, Barber avoided organized religion his entire adult life, but it requires maybe a 10-second listen to “Agnus Dei” to know we are in the company of someone with a profound religious consciousness.
Whatever your own approach and relationship to that consciousness, you will find yourself immersed in it mere seconds into “Agnus Dei,” as listeners have always been, whether those first notes are from the violins of the “Adagio” or the vocals of “Agnus Dei.” Let’s give a listen to the latter here before proceeding.
(While there are many worthy renditions with larger choirs on YouTube, the small group sings large here while reinforcing the intimate, hallowed sense that gives the song such rare power.)
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The power of “Agnus Dei” lies in the gorgeous score applied to the sound and texture of the human voice. The lyrics themselves are but a brief, almost indecipherable few snippets of prayer sung in Latin, which places the music at center stage. In English, it reads:
Lamb of God,
Who takes away the sins of the world,
Have mercy upon us...
Lamb of God,
Who takes away the sins of the world,
Grant us peace
It’s a prayer of calming and plaintive supplication, a treasured ritual among Catholics, but for my money, Barber could have as easily read off a household grocery list without losing the piece’s ravishing sense of beauty as we free-fall in a dreamscape of solemn reflection through its nearly eight-minute length.
The “Adagio/Agnus Dei” has long been noted as a relatively simple, stripped down musical journey which wastes not a second in taking in its listeners and holding them tenderly for the duration. When accaimed conductor Arturo Toscanini debuted it publicly in 1938, his description was itself the epitome of the work he knew and loved from the moment he received the score: “semplice e bella” (simple and beautiful).
Musician, composer and arts administrator Chris Myers notes the song’s arc in a perceptive essay on his website:
“The key to the Adagio’s emotional impact lies in its harmonic tension. A sustained melodic line sits exposed and alone for two long beats until the harmony finally lends its support. When the melody does move, it does so in small steps, striving again and again to climb, only to fall back as it fails to reach its goal. Yet with each attempt, it manages to stretch just a bit closer.”
Some critics have carped on the “Adagio” as an insufficiently “modern” work, more suited to the romantic tradition of bygone centuries than it was to Barber’s own time. At least on the surface, we’d have to acknowledge Barber was guilty as charged, though it does beget the question: “And the problem with that is what again?”
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Barber’s longtime lover and later cherished friend, the Italian composer/librettist Gian Carlo Menotti, was among others who came to Barber’s defense by suggesting that perhaps the atonal, discordant character of much 20th century music ala Stravinsky and Schoenberg was the form out of step with the times. Given the ravages of the century—one world war, a second on the near horizon, the Great Depression—might listeners more sorely than ever be needing salves of beauty rather than additional reflections of discord?
That’s an argument, like most artistic discussions, potentially without end, complicated all the more by Barber’s adoption of more modernist sensibilities into at least some of his compositions by the 1940s, which included the influence of his homegrown American jazz.
Another question about the “Adagio/Agnus Dei”: Is it “the saddest music in the world,” as a 2004 BBC poll suggested by more than a 2:1 ratio? The phrase was later adapted in 2010 as the title of a book by the music critic and memoirist Thomas Larson: “The Saddest Music Ever Written: The Story of Samuel Barber’s ‘Adagio for Strings.'”
Not everyone agrees with that contention, finding not so much doom and death in the piece but instead undeniable beauty and yearning without end, carrying one through the night and into a new day.
On that note, pun intended, I will leave you now with a near-complete upheaval of the doom-and-death motif. It comes in the person of Dutch DJ and electronic music maven Tiësto (Tijs Michiel Verwest), whose raves and “trance” music have been setting arenas, stadiums and impossibly crowded dance halls metaphorically ablaze throughout this first quarter of the 21st century.
Tiësto’s total reset of “Adagio for Strings” was voted by readers of “Mixmag” magazine in 2013 as “the second greatest dance record of all time,” a fact that would no doubt stun Barber and certainly stunned me when first coming upon it.
This recording below has now garnered 55 million views since its debut 17 years ago. Have to say I’m not detecting many long faces in the crowd, Tiësto’s electronic manipulations having turned the quietude of religious contemplation into the full-body expression of religious ecstasy.
Which, I have long suspected, are two sides of the same coin labeled: “stairways to heaven.”
(Which reminds me of yet another song…)
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The “Adagio,” shimmering…
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The entire original concerto concerto, in its intended quartet formulation…
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Finally, the trailer for a feature-length documentary on Barber’s life and work, with liner notes below…
The title of the film comes from a comment by Leonard Bernstein, where he compares Barber to Plato, noting that all of his music tried to form one version or another of “absolute beauty.” Others describe Barber’s music as romantic and passionate, tonal, melodious, and expressive. When you hear this achingly restrained music described in the film as “blissful agony,” or as “impeccable,” you begin to capture how extraordinary this man’s work was.
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Comments, questions, attaboys or arguments, suggestions for future posts, songs, poems? Scroll on down below, and/or on Facebook, where you can Follow my public posts and find regular 1-minute snippets of wisdom and other musings from the world’s great thinkers and artists, accompanied always by lovely photography. https://www.facebook.com/andrew.hidas/
Deep appreciation to the photographers! Unless otherwise stated, some rights reserved under Creative Commons licensing
Homepage rotating banner photos (except for library books) by Elizabeth Haslam https://www.flickr.com/photos/lizhaslam/
Library books by Larry Rose, Redlands, California, all rights reserved, contact: larry@rosefoto.com
For a list of all songs in this series, most recent first, see: http://andrewhidas.com/?s=Brilliant+songs
Misty mountain by Glenna Hopper https://unsplash.com/@gchorses
Candlelit choir by Kati Hoehl https://unsplash.com/@helenatheactress
Menotti-Barber photo from the public domain
Great article, Andrew, and so much fun to hear all these different versions.
Thanks, Jay. It’s astonishing how many different versions there the Adagio there are, all the more so because of Barber himself taking the fateful step of going vocal 31 years after the fact—and having it become a whole different kind of winner. Fascinating life, as well—I could’ve gone on & on chewing through the Internet and never coming close to the end of the discussion(s).