American Composer Samuel Barber

Samuel Barber was born in 1910 to a distinguished and well-to-do Irish-American family in Pennsylvania. His father was a doctor and his mother a pianist. He began composing music seriously in his late teens, and it was during his musical studies at the Curtis Institute that he met Gian Carlo Menotti, who became his lover, partner and musical collaborator. “Johnny” and Sam were soon inseparable.

Barber’s most famous composition by far is his “Adagio for Strings,” written while he and Menotti spent a summer in a rented house on Wolfgangsee, Austria (near Salzburg) in 1936. This eight-minute piece was originally the second movement of a string quartet. Menotti sent a version he had arranged for string orchestra to Arturo Toscanini, who championed it two years later. The rest is musical history.*

While a student at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute, Menotti spent much of his time at the Barber family home in West Chester, Pennsylvania. After graduation, the two men bought a house together in Mount Kisco, New York, which they named "Capricorn" and shared for over forty years. Capricorn boasted two independent studios, one for each composer, connected by a central room for living and entertaining. The surrounding grounds were secluded and beautifully landscaped.

Over the decades, as Barber aged, Menotti’s interest in him waned. Barber was badly affected by the adverse criticism of his later compositions and spent many years thereafter in isolation, suffering from depression. He was humiliated to see Menotti engage in relationships with men half his age. Barber died of cancer at the age of 71 in 1981 in New York and is buried in West Chester next to his parents and beloved sister. There was an empty plot next to Barber's grave that was reserved for Menotti, but when the former lover died in 2007, he was buried in Scotland.

Menotti, who lived to the age of 95, always had an eye and taste for much younger men. Well into his eighties, he had a handsome, young driver in Charleston, SC, for the duration of the Spoleto Festival (founded by Menotti). When the driver was replaced one year by someone less blessed by pulchritude, Menotti threw a fit, insisting that the former driver be found immediately.

Francis Phelan (b. 1938) was an actor and figure skater who appeared as a mime in several of Menotti’s operas. The two developed a physical relationship, and in 1974, Menotti legally adopted Phelan (known as “Chip”) as his son. Phelan took the last name of Menotti. Phelan was 36 at the time; Menotti was 63. In a perverse twist, Chip went on to marry a woman; both composer and adopted son were nearly impossible to work with as directors of international music festivals.

As time goes on, however, Menotti’s star fades, while Barber’s shines ever brighter.

Gay American composer Aaron Copland (left), with Barber (center) and Menotti.

*Many do not know that Barber himself arranged his Adagio for Strings for vocal choir (1967) under the title “Agnus Dei” (text from the Latin Mass: Lamb of God, who taketh away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us; grant us peace). This composition, in both instrumental and vocal forms, is often performed during state funerals (Franklin Roosevelt, Princess Grace of Monaco, Albert Einstein, etc.). Many first heard it when used in the soundtrack for the film “Platoon.”