A coda for Samuel Barber

It was one of the biggest disasters in modern musical history: In 1966, when a Samuel Barber premiere, “Antony and Cleopatra,” inaugurated the new home of the Metropolitan Opera at New York’s Lincoln Center, the elaborate stage machinery, teeming livestock and scores of extras marshaled by designer-director Franco Zeffirelli prompted one critic to compare it to “a group of children around a big, new Erector set.”

“New Yorkers still talk about it with glee,” the Financial Times noted recently of the production, which featured prima donna assoluta Leontyne Price, as Egypt’s queen, looking trapped inside a rotating pyramid. The consensus on Barber’s rich, lyrical score, moreover, was that it was retro at best, and the patrician, Pennsylvania-born composer, then 56, soon fled to the Italian Alps, where he spent the next several years secluded and dispirited.

After that fiasco, in fact, it was easy to forget that Barber had previously won two Pulitzer Prizes and written genuinely popular, neo-Romantic works that evoked yearning and nostalgia. In the 1930s and ‘40s, he was a great hope of American music. After Franklin Roosevelt died, Barber’s elegiac “Adagio for Strings” played on radios all over the country.

The decline in Barber’s reputation came from more than a single operatic misfire, of course. He was brought down, historians and musicians say, by shifts in musical taste, by his quasi-public homosexuality and by a strange intermingling of the two. Through the ‘60s and ‘70s, his music was performed less and less, and he was dismissed by critics as hopelessly old-fashioned. In 1981, at age 70, he died lonely, neglected and alcoholic in New York.

Today, though, Barber is a decade or so into a quiet but undeniable revival. Film director Oliver Stone may well have kick-started it in 1986, when he chose the “Adagio for Strings” to underscore his portrayal of the Vietnam War in “Platoon.” (The piece has also been used on the soundtracks of “The Elephant Man,” “El Norte,” “Lorenzo’s Oil” and “Full Metal Jacket.”) In any event, not only has Barber’s reputation ascended, but his work is being performed again.

On Saturday, Los Angeles Opera will give the first of seven performances of “Vanessa,” Barber’s 1958 portrait of a pathological woman -- to be sung, in her company debut, by soprano Kiri Te Kanawa -- who has brooded for years inside a Northern European country house. It will mark the first time the company has performed Barber’s work.

And L.A. Opera is far from alone. According to the American Symphony Orchestra League, Barber will be performed 106 times by the nation’s 100 largest orchestras this season; there will be more than a dozen performances of his Violin Concerto alone. Over the last three seasons, he’s been performed almost as much.

Those numbers place him second only to Aaron Copland among American composers, which surprises league spokesman Jack McAuliffe. “I don’t know if I would have mentioned him,” McAuliffe says. “He doesn’t have the charisma or visibility of a Copland or Bernstein or Gershwin. He’s kind of a sleeper.”

Fans fight a Barber bias

Several performers, however, have long championed Barber, among them Marin Alsop, the Colorado-based conductor who frequently leads the Los Angeles Philharmonic. She has just completed recording virtually all of his scores for six CDs on the Naxos label.

“The music offers everything a conductor could want,” says Alsop, who’s been performing Barber’s work for two decades. “It’s technically challenging, emotionally fulfilling, and the orchestras haven’t played it to death” -- so the music is fresh to them. “And it’s accessible, in good ways, to audiences. Students tell me, ‘I want to learn it.’ ”

But, she says, “I think among older music critics, there’s an enduring prejudice against Barber.”

Leonard Slatkin remembers how hard it once was to get Barber taken seriously.

“The first piece I ever conducted publicly was the ‘Adagio,’ in 1964,” says Slatkin, conductor and music director of the Washington, D.C., National Symphony. He had been drawn to Barber, he says, from an early age, attracted by the composer’s long melodic lines and a “classic restraint” that evoked Brahms.

“Barber was among our most literary composers; he was rarely seen without two or three books under his arm,” Slatkin says, noting that the composer tried to bring some of the power of great literature into his work by writing pieces inspired by the poetry of Shelley and Matthew Arnold and, with “Knoxville, Summer of 1915,” by the Southern prose of James Agee.

But Barber was out of season during Slatkin’s school days. “When we got to the 1960s,” the conductor recalls, “there was this perception that if you didn’t conform to certain academic fashions, you were passe and irrelevant.

“This attitude persisted for 25 or 30 years in this country. The academic community was rejecting romantic music,” while the avant-garde dismissed the classical past entirely in favor of composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez. “And here was an American in the tradition of the 19th century, with a big, grand, romantic set of gestures.”

What brought Barber back, Slatkin says, was a swing toward tonality and away from 12-tone and avant-garde music.

“Major singers are now singing Barber,” says Slatkin, whose soon-to-be-released recording of “Vanessa,” starring Susan Graham, will be only the second since the original cast recording. Meantime, major violinists from Hilary Hahn to Gil Shaham have embraced the Violin Concerto. “It all fits into a reassessment of Barber as a major composer.”

Indeed, as American composition has returned to tonality in general and to 19th century models in particular, Barber has come to be seen by many as ahead of his time, not behind it.

“He’s not looked at as a throwback anymore,” says Slatkin, “but as a visionary.”

A Cold War victim?

A more complicated, if fascinating, theory of Barber’s rise and fall and rise again comes from Nadine Hubbs, a musicologist and cultural historian at the University of Michigan, whose new book, “The Queer Composition of America’s Sound” (University of California Press), has already generated fierce debate in music circles.

In brief, Hubbs argues that Barber’s reputation was a victim of the Cold War and that the changing of the era’s musical tastes had ideological roots.

During the 1950s and ‘60s, she writes, as the U.S. was becoming more internationally audacious, increasingly contrasting itself with the Soviet Union, the nation still defined itself by its high culture. Classical music, she says, was a way the young, brawny country could advertise its seriousness -- and imperial ambitions -- to the rest of the world.

And the U.S. needed music that seemed bold and original enough for a great power. Ideally, its culture would be scientific and complex in the era of Sputnik and atomic physics.

“It was about masculinity,” Hubbs says of the period’s political and cultural tone. “In times of uncertainty and fearfulness in America, in times of perceived threat, the nation seeks anxiously to butch up its act.”

The only problem, in this view, was that many of the composers who had given the United States a distinct national music in the 1930s and ‘40s -- Copland, Barber, Virgil Thomson, Leonard Bernstein -- were gay. And their music was not the dissonant, complex, quasi-scientific 12-tone serialism of Arnold Schoenberg -- music that, some American critics and composers boasted, could be composed only in the capitalist West because of Stalin’s opposition to it in the Soviet bloc. Rather, it was lush, tonal, romantic.

“Serialism and complexity were butch. Tonality was femme,” Hubbs says of an equation she contends lurked invisibly in the culture. Most of these gay, tonal composers had trouble during this period, she explains -- trouble that included not only sagging reputations but congressional investigations.

As the nation sought a self-consciously American art music, Barber had an additional problem: Unlike the work of his peers, his compositions did not evoke wide-open plains or glittering city streets. Instead, he was a “Europeanist,” who sounded almost German.

In 2004, it’s hard to conceive of a composer being snubbed this way.

“We can’t even understand the notion of a Europeanist composer,” or why such an appellation would spell doom, Hubbs says. “Classical composition isn’t expected to bear our cultural prestige, our intellectual freight, to the rest of the world. With the lowering of the stakes, serialism is no longer needed to rattle the chains of cultural superiority.

“Now that the stakes are lower, no one is watching us. People are writing what they want to write.” Nor is there the same kind of “lavender scare” in the world of high culture.

A final reason for the renewed interest in Barber, according to Hubbs, is less abstract: The “Adagio” was played repeatedly on the radio after the Sept. 11 attacks, evoking earlier uses of the piece.

“What the music does now is conjure an idealized past that is specifically American,” Hubbs says. “Now Barber, formerly the Europeanist, is heard more and more as an Americanist. It’s not music that conjures prairies, as Copland’s does. But after being heard following the death of FDR, and as the ‘Platoon’ theme song, Barber is now American, if not Americana.”

And Barber’s had the last laugh: Last year, a revised, unstaged version of the star-crossed “Antony and Cleopatra” was put on at Carnegie Hall -- to an enthusiastic response from audiences and critics alike.

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‘Vanessa’

Where: Los Angeles Opera at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., Los Angeles

When: 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 1, 9, 15, 18; 2 p.m. Dec. 4 and 12

Price: $25 to $190

Contact: (213) 972-8001 or www.losangelesopera.com