It’s Tuesday and the dVerse Poets Pub is open with a selection of hot and cold drinks, spicy sweet potato soup, and crusty rustic bread, as well as a selection of delicious poetry.  I’m Kim from writinginnorthnorfolk.com, your host for this week’s Poetics.

When I was twelve or thirteen, I dreamed of being a classical musician, but my love of literature took over, and I only managed a couple of years of classical guitar before I fell in love with rock music. However, I never lost my love of classical music.

One of the pieces that always moves me is ‘Adagio for Strings’ by Samuel Barber, a piece that is recognisable to many.

Samuel Osmond Barber II (March 9, 1910 – January 23, 1981) was an American composer, pianist, conductor, baritone, and music educator. A child prodigy, he began studying the piano at the age of six and at age seven composed his first work, ‘Sadness’. When he was ten years old, Barber wrote his first operetta, ‘The Rose Tree’ and, at twelve years old, he became an organist at a local church. At the age of fourteen, Barber entered the youth artist program at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where he ultimately spent ten years developing his talents as a triple prodigy in composition, voice, and piano. Following his graduation from high school in 1928, he entered the adult professional program at Curtis, from which he graduated in 1934.

Barber was adept at both instrumental and vocal music. His works were successful on the international stage and many of his compositions enjoyed rapid adoption into the classical performance canon. His ‘Adagio for Strings’ (1936) has earned a permanent place in the orchestral concert repertory, as has its adaptation for chorus, ‘Agnus Dei’ (1967). Barber received the Pulitzer Prize for Music twice: for his opera ‘Vanessa’ (1956–1957), and for the ‘Concerto for Piano and Orchestra’ (1962).

‘Adagio for Strings’ was originally the second movement of Barber’s String Quartet, Op. 11, composed in 1936 while he was spending a summer in Europe with Gian Carlo Menotti, an Italian composer and Barber’s partner since their student years at the Curtis Institute of Music. Barber was inspired by Virgil’s didactic poem ‘Georgics’. In the quartet, the Adagio follows a violently contrasting first movement (Molto allegro e appassionato) and is succeeded by a third movement that opens with a brief reprise of the music from the first movement (marked Molto allegro (come prima) – Presto).

In 1938, when Barber was 28, ‘Adagio for Strings’ was performed by the NBC Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Arturo Toscanini, along with his first ‘Essay for Orchestra’. Toscanini had rarely performed music by American composers before. At the end of the first rehearsal of the piece, Toscanini remarked, “Semplice e bella” (simple and beautiful).

In 2004, listeners to the BBC Radio’s Today program voted ‘Adagio for Strings’ the “saddest classical” work ever. Among other occasions, it was broadcast over radio at the announcement of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death in 1945 and played at the funeral of Albert Einstein in 1955, as well as being performed by the National Symphony Orchestra in a national radio broadcast following the funeral of assassinated President John F. Kennedy in 1963 – it was one of Kennedy’s favourite pieces of music – and the funeral of Princess Grace of Monaco in 1982.

Adagio for Strings can also be heard on many film and television soundtracks, including ‘The Elephant Man’ (1980), ‘Platoon’ (1986), ‘Lorenzo’s Oil’ (1992), and ‘Outlander’ (2019). More comedic or light-hearted uses of it have appeared in the film ‘Amélie’ (2001) and on episodes of the sitcoms ‘Seinfeld’, ‘The Simpsons’, ‘American Dad!’, and ‘South Park’.

Source Wikipedia

Now listen to ‘Adagio for Strings’ conducted by Gustavo Dudamel and played by the Wiener Philharmoniker.

Your challenge:

Write a poem that does one of the following:

1. Expresses your thoughts and feelings on listening to this piece of music.
2. Describes the music in words.
3. Explores the music through imaginative imagery or storytelling.

To help you, I have included some comments made by people about Adagio for Strings:

“This piece perfectly represents the pain of being a living person.”

“This is what it sounds like when angels sing in heaven.”

“In a perfect world, this is the song we should all hear when we depart this earth.”

“Music is mankind’s greatest contribution.”

“The duality of man, sir.” – Full Metal Jacket

“Barber’s Adagio for Strings makes the world stop when I hear it.”

“It doesn’t play. It bleeds. It rises like grief in the throat. It breaks like prayer in a hollowed cathedral.”

Leave yourself time to refine your draft and then follow the usual instructions:

• Write a poem in response to the challenge.
• Enter a link directly to your poem and your name by clicking Mr Linky below.
• There you will find links to other poets, and more will join, so check back for their poems.
• Read and comment on other poets’ work – we all come here to have our poems appreciated.
• Please link back to dVerse from your site/blog.
• Mister Linky will close on Saturday at 3 p.m. EST.
• Comment and participate in our discussion below, if you like. We are a friendly bunch of poets.
• Have fun.