The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Samuel Barber · the composer’s arrangement for string orchestra of the slow movement of his String Quartet in B minor, Op. 11 · one movement, Molto adagio, in B flat minor · about eight minutes in performance
Mode
Elegy for string orchestra; one stepwise line spun without contrast over sustained harmony, in a late Romantic tonal manner
Mythos
The lament evoked: threnody, dirge and liturgical mourning in a chant-like line; the wave of rising, breaking and returning as a shape
Phase
One movement, Molto adagio, in B flat minor: a statement, a climb by waves, a late fortissimo summit, a full silence, quiet chords, a shortened return, a close on the dominant
Presentation
Concert music; the composer’s arrangement for string orchestra of the slow movement of his String Quartet, Op. 11, for first and second violins, violas, cellos and double basses, with divided parts
Register
From a soft line over held chords to strings massed fortissimo in their top register, and back; one tempo, one character
Scale
One consciousness in one state; one line; about eight minutes
Governing Proposition
A single stepwise melody, begun softly over held chords, is passed among the strings and climbs by waves to a fortissimo summit in the top register, where it is cut off by silence; then quiet chords, the melody again, shorter, and a close on the dominant. The wager of the work is that grief is one long breath that cannot be shortened, and that a form which breaks and does not resolve can show mourning as unfinished.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The work begins softly. The first violins take up a long stepwise melody over sustained chords, Molto adagio, in B flat minor, at a slow pulse, and the line seems to have nowhere to stop. It is one breath, and the work is the course of it. There is one movement and one theme, and nothing in the eight minutes stands against it. The melody is carried in turn by other sections of the orchestra, climbs by successive waves to a fortissimo climax in the high register, is cut off by a full silence, and returns, shortened, after quiet chords. The work ends quietly, on the dominant.
The Adagio for Strings is Samuel Barber’s arrangement for string orchestra of the slow movement of his String Quartet in B minor, Op. 11, which he composed in 1935 and 1936 while living in Europe, at about twenty-five and twenty-six. It is scored for first and second violins, violas, cellos and double basses, with divided parts. The arrangement is the work. The quartet movement is its source, and bears on what the arrangement inherits, its line, its harmony and its plan; it is not scored apart. In performance the Adagio runs from about seven minutes to ten, and most performances fall near eight.
The claim of the work is in its plan. Grief here is not a story with turns. It is a pressure that rises by its own weight to a point it cannot pass, breaks, and resumes without resolution. A form with a contrasting middle, or a set of variations, or a song closing on a cadence, would know grief as something that turns and concludes. The arch with one summit and an open end knows it as one continuous force. Every stage of it is a step the climax needs, and the last step is the refusal of a last cadence.
Movement II
The quartet was the work of a young composer abroad, and of its movements only this one entered general circulation. In Barber’s arrangement the string orchestra gives the line two things a quartet cannot. At the summit it gives mass: many players to a part, the sound massed in the top register. Throughout, it gives a sound sustained without breath or decay, the medium for a melody that must not stop. The work’s own history marks the limit of that claim. The same music lives as quartet, as string orchestra and, from 1967, as a setting for choir, with its knowledge intact, so the medium is a strong choice and not the only one.
The inheritance is the slow string movement of late Romanticism and of its English and American successors: Mahler’s Adagietto, the string elegies of Elgar and others, the chorale-like adagio. The Adagio departs from it little. Its harmony is tonal and modestly chromatic, its line is vocal, its form is the arch, and no device in it would have struck a listener of 1900 as strange. What is its own, one line spun without a contrasting theme, phrases of irregular length, the cut at the summit and the unresolved close, is an accent within the tradition rather than a turn from it.
The stake was real. To write this in the 1930s, in the decade of Schoenberg, Stravinsky and the American modernists, was to accept the charge of conservatism, and Barber bore it. But departure is scored as the turn and the stake together, and the turn was back toward the inherited path. The Swerve stands at 6.6, the lowest of the work’s figures but one, and it is the figure that most divides the Adagio from the other concert works on the desk. The Quartet for the End of Time, which also has slow string lines at its heart, stands at 8.9 on it.
Movement III
The climb proceeds by waves. The line is stated, restated in another voice, raised in register, and the harmony tightens under it; each wave rises higher than the last. The melody moves almost wholly by step and never stalls, because its phrases are of irregular length, and suspensions and passing dissonances in the inner parts keep the harmony moving under a slow pulse without a wasted chord. The scoring puts the line where each section sounds fullest. The climb is built from register and density, not from louder material: the line does not change; it is carried higher and pressed harder.
The climax comes late, between three quarters and five sixths of the way through: fortissimo, the strings massed in their top register. Then it is cut off, and there is a full silence. That silence is the most famous moment in the work, and it holds no sound. It is part of the height, not a relief from it: the line has reached a point it cannot pass, and the work shows this by stopping. Take the silence away and the climax becomes an ending. It is placed exactly, and it is the plainest case in the score of form doing the knowing.
The work reaches its summit once. A single summit counts for less than repeated rising, and The Sublime stands at 8.6 because the climb that leads there is itself a rising, wave over wave, and because the beauty of the line, at the start and again after the silence, is a second elevation. Winterreise, at 9.3, rises again and again in different registers. The making is assured and bounded. The means are few, the climb leans on sequence so that the architecture is simple, and in the larger body some lines are thickened by doubling rather than rewritten. One wave of the sequence could go with a loss of weight but not of argument.
Movement IV
After the silence come quiet chords, and then the opening melody returns in shortened form. The climax was the opening line under pressure, and now the line comes back as it began: the same steps in the same narrow compass, obeying the law that governed the summit. The work ends quietly on the dominant, without returning to the chord of its home key. That close is the most statable thing it knows. It refuses consolation, and mourning is shown as unfinished. Remove the return and the work stops at its scream; resolve the close and it consoles, which it must not.
What the work discloses can be put in a sentence: grief is one long breath that cannot be shortened, that rises to a point it cannot pass, breaks into silence, and resumes without resolution. It is a meaning, and the form builds it. It is also one meaning, narrowly held, and the work is mostly the rendering of a mood; The Unconcealment stands at 7.4. Its use as the sound of national mourning is reception, not disclosure, and is not credited. Against the Goldberg Variations, which disclose a relation between law and play, the Adagio discloses a condition of feeling more than a truth about a person.
The archetype it evokes is the lament: threnody, dirge, the processional mourning of liturgy, in a line many listeners hear as chant. In 1967 Barber set the same music for choir to the text of the Agnus Dei, and the setting shows that he heard it so. But it is a separate arrangement, made three decades later, and it supplies a text the string work lacks; it cannot be lent back. In the work as it stands nothing is named and no figure is built. The wave of rising, breaking and returning is archetypal as a shape, and a shape is not yet a myth. The Archetypal Deep stands at 7.0.
Movement V
Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony Orchestra gave the first performance in a broadcast concert of 5 November 1938, in the same programme as Barber’s first Essay for Orchestra. Since then the work has been performed continuously. It has been recorded by most orchestras that play strings; broadcast in the United States after the deaths of President Roosevelt in 1945 and President Kennedy in 1963, as is commonly reported; heard in the films The Elephant Man (1980) and Platoon (1986), the second its best-known use on film; and carried into choral, band and dance versions. It is regularly named in polls and broadcasts as the saddest piece of classical music.
That presence is the work’s highest figure, The Imperishable at 9.1: the form whole, the presence as wide as that of any concert work of its century, charged at the surface, where ubiquity at funerals and in films has worn the work toward a sign for sadness. The reach is real and particular. The Adagio became the model of elegiac string music in American public life and in film, so that a slow string threnody over a battlefield or a deathbed is now a language. But it redirected use and a film idiom more than composition, and no school of concert music turned on it. The performance tradition is still argued, over tempo, restraint and the length of the silence, yet the work yields less on return than at first hearing.
What holds it below Tier IV is its size and its choice. It holds one consciousness in one state, with time and, by evocation, the sacred; the family, labour, the state, history and the natural order do not appear, and The Encompassed, at 5.8, falls below its own floor. It keeps an inherited manner, and it evokes a lament it does not build. The twelve sum to 93.0, level with The Elephant Man, the film that carries this music, at 7.8. It stands there by its form: eight minutes, one line and one feeling, each part of it required, ending as it must on a chord that does not close.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test finds very little to take. There is one line and one arch, and every stage of the climb is a step the climax needs: a statement, a restatement in another voice, a rise in register, a tightening of the harmony, the summit, the silence. Remove the silence and the climax becomes an ending; remove the shortened return and the work stops at its scream; remove the open close and it consoles, which it must not. The test bites in the climb, which proceeds by sequence, the same stepwise shape restated higher: one wave of it could go with a loss of weight but not of argument. Eight minutes are easy to keep necessary, and the brevity is not credited.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The disclosure can be stated: grief is one long breath that cannot be shortened, that rises by its own pressure to a point it cannot pass, breaks into silence and resumes without resolution. The open close is the most statable part. The work ends on the dominant and refuses consolation, so that mourning is shown as unfinished, and that meaning is built by the form, not lent by a listener. But it is one meaning, narrowly held, and the work is mostly the rendering of a mood. Its public use as the sound of national mourning is reception and is not credited. It discloses a condition of feeling more than a truth about a person.
Score: 7.4 / 10
Height is real and high. The climax, the strings massed fortissimo in their top register and then cut to nothing, is among the plainest moments of the sublime in the concert music of its century, and the silence after it is part of the height, not a relief from it. The beauty of the line at the start, and of its return after the silence, is a second elevation. Frequency is the question. The work is one ascent, and it reaches its summit once. The figure holds above that rule because the climb is not flat, each wave rising higher than the last. Winterreise, at 9.3, and the Goldberg Variations, at 8.9, rise again and again in different registers.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The archetype evoked is the lament: threnody, dirge, the processional mourning of liturgy, in a narrow stepwise line often heard as chant. Barber’s own setting of the music to the Agnus Dei in 1967 shows that he heard it so, but it is another arrangement, and its text cannot be lent back to this one. In the string work nothing is named and no figure is built; the particular is a line of notes, not a person, a place or an act. The shape of rising, breaking and returning, the wave or the breath, is archetypal and bears weight, but a shape is not yet a myth. The state funeral and the battlefield attached to it are the world’s, not the work’s.
Score: 7.0 / 10
The inheritance is the slow string movement of late Romanticism and its English and American successors: Mahler’s Adagietto, the string elegies of Elgar and others, the chorale-like adagio. The departure is small. The harmony is tonal and modestly chromatic, the line vocal, the form an arch, and no device in it would have struck a listener of 1900 as strange. Its own features, one line spun without a contrasting theme, phrases of irregular length, the cut at the summit and the open close, are accents within the tradition. There was a stake: to write this in the decade of Schoenberg, Stravinsky and the American modernists was to accept the charge of conservatism. But a wager on a proven path is not a swerve.
Score: 6.6 / 10
Change the form and the work loses most of what it knows. With a contrasting middle, or as variations, it would know grief as something that turns and concludes; the arch with one summit and an open end knows it as one continuous pressure that breaks and is not resolved. The silence after the climax is form doing the knowing. The string orchestra adds what the quartet cannot: mass at the summit, and a sound sustained without breath or decay for a line that must not stop. Held below the top because the music lives as quartet, string orchestra and choir with its knowledge intact, and the sequential climb is nearer a container.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Evidence, not promise, over ninety years. The performance tradition is real and still argued: the work runs from about seven minutes to ten, and each conductor answers differently how much restraint and how much weight, how long the silence, how hard the climax may be pressed. The literature is modest, and the larger subject of return is the reception itself: why this piece became the public sound of grief. But the work yields less on return than at first hearing. Its line, plan and harmony are clear at once, and long acquaintance finds no hidden order of the kind the Goldberg Variations hold in their ladder of canons. Formal depth is limited by design, and semantic depth is mostly the mood’s.
Score: 7.4 / 10
The field is American and European concert music of the 1930s. The work did not reorganise what music could do. It renewed a manner, the long-breathed tonal string adagio, as the field moved away from it; the intrinsic force is modest. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach is large and of a particular kind. The work became the model of elegiac string music in American public life and in film scoring, so that the slow string threnody over a battlefield or a deathbed is now a language. It redirected use and a film idiom more than composition; no school or practice of concert music turned on it, and its reach is presence more than pressure.
Score: 7.3 / 10
Survival is weighed over ninety years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the score survives complete in the composer’s own arrangement and has never been in doubt. Presence is as wide as that of any concert work of its century: performed continuously since 1938, recorded by most orchestras that play strings, broadcast at public deaths, carried into film and into choral, band and dance versions. The charge is on the surface. Ubiquity at funerals and in films has worn the work toward a sign for sadness, and much of its presence is use, which counts as presence, not as proof of permanence. The figure stands a tenth below the widest presence its age allows.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Command of line, harmony and string writing, and the making bears weight. The melody moves almost wholly by step yet never stalls, because its phrases are of irregular length. Suspensions and passing dissonances in the inner parts keep the harmony moving under a slow pulse without a wasted chord. The scoring places the line where it sounds fullest in each section and builds the climax by register and density rather than by louder material, and the silence is placed exactly. The costs: the means are few; the climb leans on sequence, so the architecture is simple; and the arrangement thickens some lines by doubling rather than rewriting for the larger body. Assured and bounded, below the Goldberg Variations at 9.7.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the opening, soft, the line alone over held chords, and the climax, fortissimo, in the top register. One law governs both: the same stepwise line in a narrow compass, carried higher and pressed harder, so that the scream is the whisper under pressure. The return after the silence obeys it, and the open close follows from it; nothing in the work contradicts it. But narrowness is not coherence, and the range here is narrow: one tempo, one character, one theme, one texture of sustained strings. The law holds across a single distance, from soft to loud and from low to high, not across contrasting worlds. That is real unity at a modest range.
Score: 8.2 / 10
A low mark on a small form describes the form. The work holds one consciousness in one state, grief, and integrates it with time, in the breath and the long unbroken duration, and by evocation with the sacred, in the chant-like line. The social enters only through use, which is not the work. The family, labour, the state, history and the natural order do not appear. What holds the figure below its own floor of 6.0 is that count: eight minutes, one line and one feeling hold fewer orders than a song cycle, a variation set or a quartet in seven movements. The figure is the form’s, and it is stated, not excused.
Score: 5.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.1, then The Inevitable, The Sublime and The Made at 8.6. A score whole in its composer’s arrangement and performed continuously since 1938, its presence as wide as that of any concert work of its century; one line and one arch in which the climb, the silence and the shortened return are each required; a climax cut off into a silence that is part of the height; and a making that keeps a stepwise line moving under a slow pulse without a wasted chord.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 5.8, below its own floor: one consciousness in one state, with time and, by evocation, the sacred, and the family, labour, the state, history and the natural order absent. Next above it, The Swerve at 6.6: a wager placed on a proven path, the late Romantic string adagio kept in the decade of the modernists. Then The Archetypal Deep at 7.0: a lament evoked by a bare and powerful means, a shape rather than a myth. These are one fact, the size and manner of a single eight-minute arch, and they hold the work below Tier IV.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.6 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.4, The Made at 8.6, The Inner Law at 8.2, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.1 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 7.4, Pressure on Tradition at 7.3, The Archetypal Deep at 7.0 and The Swerve at 6.6 fall short. The Universal Minimum is unmet at five of the eleven axes it covers: The Unconcealment at 7.4, The Bottomless Well at 7.4, Pressure on Tradition at 7.3, The Archetypal Deep at 7.0 and The Swerve at 6.6, all below 7.5. The Megethos Floor is unmet: The Encompassed at 5.8 falls short of its own floor of 6.0 by two tenths. Two of the five summit conditions are met, the Necessity Cap and the Coherence Floor. The twelve sum to 93.0, an average of 7.75 that displays 7.8, on the rounding line: the work stands where its aggregate places it, in the band of Tier III, short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · the score of Barber’s Adagio for Strings, Op. 11, his arrangement for string orchestra of the slow movement (Molto adagio) of his String Quartet in B minor, Op. 11, and its performance tradition, read from knowledge under the desk’s convention for concert music; no score, edition or recording was in hand, and bar numbers are not given. The string-orchestra arrangement is scored as one work, a single movement; the quartet movement is its source and is evidence for what the arrangement inherits, not scored apart. Barber’s setting of the same music to the Agnus Dei for choir (1967) is a separate later arrangement and bears on presence only; no single performance or recording is the object. There are no words, and none are quoted beyond the composer’s heading. The work’s age and the place of its climax in the span were computed by script. Details that could not be verified are not given, among them where the quartet was written, the year the arrangement was made and when it reached Toscanini, the date of publication, the account of Toscanini’s first response to the score, the chord of the climax, the metre and the bar count, which sections carry the melody in turn and in what register, the part of the double basses, particular later performances and remixes, the details of the polls that name the work, and the titles of the literature on it. The running time is a range across the recorded tradition, not a measurement, and the sound of the work as heard is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged.