A NEW WORK FOR OBOE
BY SAMUEL BARBER
Samuel Barber's Canzonetta, Op. 48
received its world
premiere performances on December 17, 19, and 19, 1981.
Harold Gomberg was soloist with the New York Philharmonic,
Zubin Mehta conducting. The following program note by John
Corigliano is reprinted here with permission.
Samuel Barber was neither a revolutionary nor an
innovator. He led no "movement" and his palette was graced
by no Ivesian experiments. The truth is, Barber was an
admitted unabashed Romantic, and certain of his works sound
decidedly last-century -- a cardinal sin, according to some
critics. Nevertheless, in view of the interest that more
than a few composers are presently showing in romantic
expression, it is intriguing to speculate on how a young
composer today might choose to regard the music of Barber.
Fashions change.
During the time I studied composition at Columbia
University in the late 1950s, I don't believe I ever heard
Barber's name mentioned there, unless in disdain, probably
because he was considered too conservative to be of any
interest. Amusingly, I recall Barber once telling me of his
own school days at the Curtis Institute of Music, and how he
himself had gone with fellow students to Philadelphia
Orchestra concerts to laugh at, as he rather ironically put
it, "poor 'old-fashioned' Rachmaninoff."
Now well past my student years, I think of Barber's art
with admiration and amazement not because he did things no
one else did, but because he did some things so much better
than anyone else. A score like Knoxville Summer of 1915 is a
marvel of simplicity without being in any way simple minded,
for Barber displayed always an incredible surety of craft
and, similar to Mozart, an aristocratic melodic taste which
set him apart from his more emotional Romantic
contemporaries on the American scene.
His lyricism was vocally inspired (he was himself a
fine baritone, and an aunt, Louise Homer, had been a leading
Metropolitan Opera contralto in his youth), and all of his
work can be analyzed in relation to the voice.
Thus, it seems fitting
that his final music should be entitled Canzonetta, which
traditionally means a brief, lyrical song.
Written in the fall and winter of 1978 not long after the
completion of the Third Essay for Orchestra, the
Canzonetta for Oboe and String Orchestra, Op. 48
was intended as the
middle movement of a three-movement oboe concerto
commissioned by the New York Philharmonic for Harold Gomberg
with a gift from Francis Goelet as one of a series of
compositions for solo orchestral instruments. Tragically,
the onslaught of cancer, from which Barber died less than
three years later, prevented him from finishing the work. He
had composed first the lyrical centerpiece of the concerto,
because slow music for oboe came to him most easily. (I
remember his telling me at the time that although he knew he
would have no trouble with a slow movement, he had as yet no
idea what to do for the fast ones). The short-score of this
slow movement was marked "Andante for Oboe and Orchestra,"
with the tempo indication Andante sostenuto; however, in
1980 Barber told Phillip Ramey, the Philharmonic's
annotator, that he realized he would not be able to complete
the concerto, but that the extant movement could stand alone
and should be titled
Canzonetta for Oboe and String Orchestra.
In October, 1981, the Canzonetta was orchestrated
by composer Charles Turner, a student and longtime friend of
Barber.
Anyone familiar with the manner in which Barber treated
the oboe (and the English horn, another favorite instrument)
in his orchestral scores will immediately realize how
sympathetic the idea of an oboe concerto must have been. In
this context, one thinks of the second movement of the
Violin Concerto, with its elegant oboe line, the extended
oboe solo in the Intermezzo from the opera Vanessa (I well
recall Mr. Gomberg's elegant performance of this at a New
York Philharmonic Promenade concert years ago, with Barber
in the audience), and the folk like purity of the solo oboe
in the early School for Scandal Overture. It should, then,
come as no surprise that this last Barber "song" is
perfectly suited to the oboe and is eloquent and moving.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the Canzonetta
is the way two opposed harmonic procedures which Barber
employed throughout his career are combined. His music,
while always lyrical, often alternated between a highly
chromatic, post-Straussian romanticism and an oft-diatonic,
typically American simplicity. Scores like the
Violin Concerto (especially the first two movements),
Knoxville,
Excursions for Piano, and many of the songs are simple,
unadorned and basically diatonic, while other pieces
-- for instance, the
Piano Sonata,
Andromache's Farewell
and the
Piano Concertoare
--
extremely chromatic.
Although the two elements can exist within the same work,
they most often deal with different material -- that is, there
are diatonic melodies and developments, and chromatic
melodies and developments.
Canzonetta, however, has one ingenuous melody running
throughout. At the beginning, it is presented in an
absolutely diatonic setting (the first sixteen bars have no
accidentals at all, either in solo or accompaniment), but as
the piece unfolds the same theme (which, interestingly,
bears a rather close resemblance in both melodic and
harmonic outline to the opening theme of the Violin
Concerto) becomes more angular, changing into a chromatic
version of itself. Even its uncomplicated rhythm becomes
somewhat irregular. Beginning with a lyric, polyphonic
introduction (which recurs twice during the course of the
work), the Canzonetta alternates this intense, chromatic
rendition of the theme with the original diatonic treatment,
and finally ends as it began, with the simple oboe song.
Harold Gomberg was the solo oboist of the New York
Philharmonic for thirty-four years, retiring in 1977 to make
guest appearances with the major orchestras of the world.
The Barber Canzonetta was composed expressly for him. When
Mr. Gomberg first joined the Orchestra in 1943, Artur
Rodzinski was Music Director. During his tenure he
collaborated with such conductors as Leonard Bernstein,
Pierre Boulez, Dimitri Mitropoulos, Leopold Stokowski,
George Szell, Bruno Walter, Daniel Barenboim, Lorin Maazel,
Charles Munch and present Philharmonic Music Director Zubin
Mehta.
Born in Malden, Massachusetts, Mr. Gomberg was awarded
a scholarship at age eleven to study the oboe with Marcel
Tabuteau at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia,
where his two brothers studied as well. Mr. Gomberg also met
his wife, the well known harpist composer Margret Brill, at
Curtis. His professional career began at age seventeen, when
he was engaged as solo oboist of the St. Louis Symphony
under Vladimir Golschmann.
Among Mr. Gomberg's many recordings,
The Baroque Oboe
on CBS Masterworks and
The Art of Harold Gomberg on Vanguard
are the best known. Both recordings feature paintings by Mr.
Gomberg on the album covers. Along with his musical career,
he has been a painter for some twenty years and has
exhibited works throughout the United States and Europe. His
teaching career includes many years at The Julliard School
and seminars in Israel and, at Pierre Boulez' invitation, at
the Institut de Recherche et de Coodination Acoustique
Musique (IRCAM) in Paris.
Andrew Porter reported on the premiere in the January
18, 1982 issue of the New Yorker. He found it "a graceful
and endearing work, based on a charming and shapely lyrical
melody, deftly treated. It needs, I think a similar and more
modest kind of interpretation than Mr. Gomberg's. His
phrasing was emphatic, and he did some off things to the
score: appropriated a first violin line, and turned some measured
strains into a free-tempo cadenza. Barber was a fastidious
and sure artist. "Canzonetta is slight but elegantly
written."
Bill Zakariasen, writing in the Daily News on December
22, 1981 found the work "a sweetly elegiacal piece of some
seven minutes duration, and if its interest is marginal, the
composer's individual imprint pervades every measure. It
might have sounded more important, however, had it been
played with more nuance and reliability of intonation than
Harold Gomberg provided."