Like many homes, the Barbers had a piano, and Sam and his younger sister, Sara, received piano and voice lessons. Heyman notes, music in West Chester was thought a вЂњdiversion,вЂќ a necessary pastime or hobby, a benchmark of civilized society, not a career per se.

They loved spoiling their son whose childhood was overseen by cooks and servants and Sunday outings for classical music. His father was a physician, affable and community-minded, his mother, an amateur pianist. Samuel Osborne Barber was born March 9, 1910, in West Chester, Pennsylvania, to a comfortable and well-educated family, whose lineage was British, Irish, and Scottish. And yet some dark emotion rooted in his core shaped BarberвЂ™s childhood and adolescence-lodged in him from birth and emerging as he grows-which might account for his composing a piece of such immense sorrow so early in his life. How did Barber, at the tender age of twenty-six, write such a piece? Is it possible that his youth explains his genius? His genius explain his youth? It seems too easy to say that the child is father to the man when we see how much mature music the man wrote in his twenties. I find his character as intriguing as his compositions. And this passion is rooted in Barber the man, a scarily gifted musician, whose youth vibrated with musical ardor and whose age darkened with alcoholic depression. I am fascinated by its emotional tension, its usefulness to our culture, its effect upon my family and me, and its evolution through our changing media. My passion for BarberвЂ™s extraordinary elegy encompasses more than the piece itself.

Hardcover, September 2010, paperback, March 2012.ДЄ YouTube video of my one-hour 'Saddest Music' multimedia presentation at Warwick's Bookstore, La Jolla, CA, Tuesday, November 30, 2010.

The Saddest Music Ever Written: The Story of Samuel Barber's 'Adagio for Strings,' Pegasus Books. The Saddest Music Ever Written: The Story of Samuel Barber's 'Adagio for Strings'ДЄdagio for Strings: Leonard Slatkin, BBC orchestra, September 15, 2001, perhaps its longest and most emotional performance ever.

Samuel barber bio