No major American composer of the twentieth century was a more ardent and eloquent champion of the lyrical, accessible, yet modern idiom than Samuel Barber. His musical style is founded in the romantic traditions of the nineteenth century, and built upon and extended the harmonic language and formal structures of that time. Unlike so many of his peers, he was not powerfully swayed by the modernism emanating from Europe after World War I, but pursued his own path.
Consistently lyrical throughout his career, it is telling that his songs constitute about two-thirds of his compositions in number. His vocal works include two major operas, Vanessa (1956), and Antony and Cleopatra (1966), the latter composed for the opening of the Metropolitan Opera House. He composed at least one work for almost every musical genre, and unlike most composers, he was a recognized and published composer from his student days. At the age of twenty-one his overture to The School for Scandal was an instant success, was forthwith published, and remains in the standard repertoire. Though his choral music and solo vocal music are mainstays of concerts, it is an instrumental work that is his best-known composition–the Adagio for Strings, championed by Toscanini when Barber was only twenty-eight years old. The vocally inspired lyricism of that work is emblematic of all that Barber wrote, even in the most vigorous of works.
But few composers of genius can be forced into stylistic strait jackets; their depth of talent enables them to speak with diverse voices, and Barber’s musical imagination surfaced as easily in dynamic, forceful virtuosity as well as it did in eloquent lyricism. A case in point is his Toccata Festiva for organ and orchestra, written in 1960. Barber was one of the most celebrated graduates of the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, and it is no surprise that when a magnificent new pipe organ was installed in that city’s Academy of Music (home of the Philadelphia Orchestra) it was he who was commissioned for the dedicatory work at the inaugural concert. The organ was the gift of the esteemed philanthropist Mary Louise Curtis, founder of the Curtis Institute (1924) and an early patroness of Barber. Moreover, in addition to funding the organ, she also saw to it that Barber received the composition’s commission and financial support.
In the later nineteenth century, large pipe organs were de rigueur in large concert halls, and composers happily included them in symphonic showpieces for orchestra. Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra and Saint-Saëns’ “Organ” Symphony are exemplars. By the end of the twentieth-century, public tastes and budget constraints led to their removal or omission in new halls. A case in point is the absence of such an organ in New York’s David Geffen Hall in Lincoln Center. When the hall was completely renovated in 2022 the original, imposing Æolian-Skinner organ was dismantled and sold to a church in California—nothing replaced it. The absence of a large pipe organ in any significant concert venue in NYC is still a point of contention in the arts community. And, even the organ that Philadelphia installed in 1960 was sold when the orchestra moved to its impressive new digs at Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts in 2001. But an outstanding new organ was installed in the new Verizon Hall therein. The Davies Symphony Hall (1980) in San Francisco has a 147-rank organ, so things are looking up in the symphony hall–pipe organ world.
Barber entitled his work a toccata, a time-honored genre with roots as far back as the fifteenth century. The toccata’s early zenith was in the hands of the early sixteenth-century composer and organist, Girolamo Frescobaldi, who influenced later important composers, leading to J.S. Bach. The word, toccata, simply means a “touch” piece, wherein the dexterity of the fingers showcases a virtuosic display of the player, composer, and organ. There is no set form, it is a totally free composition designed to dazzle with sizzling scales, cascading arpeggios, impressive sonorities, and the juxtaposition of all of the timbres of the instrument’s myriad pipes—with a healthy dose of drama! This, Barber supplies amply—showcasing the new Æolian-Skinner’s resources, from the many colorful solo stops to the massive full organ.
The orchestra alone opens with a smashing A unison and scale, ending in writhing chromatic arpeggios. After a brief extension of this idea, the trumpets and then horns play an important contrasting motive, followed by first entrance of the organ, employing its reeds. The organ alone continues with dazzling arpeggios that seem to use every note of the chromatic scale. Orchestra and organ quickly play off both of these ideas until lush, quiet strings—in the best Barber tradition–introduce the second main idea, which the organ then takes up. In a gesture to tradition, Barber locates this peaceful theme on (but not in) the dominant key. Little “pin pricks” in the woodwinds—based on a variation of an earlier motive–dance over the smooth legato in the organ. Barber continues to work with these ideas with continual changes of color in both the organ stops and solo instruments in the orchestra—the English horn especially. After this lyrical section is extended, the organ begins a lengthy solo section beginning with typical, appropriate “wandering chromaticism” that snakes hither and thither. Finally a solo French horn and soft strings conclude this first section.
Moving on, the bombastic scales and arpeggios of the beginning are heard again, introducing an extended exploration and development of all the ideas so familiar by now. All kinds of interesting combinations of colors and textures in both the organ and orchestra answer back and forth, especially featuring light dancing woodwinds. But the tempo and volume gradually increase, growing into a mad dash that ends in a Stravinskian array of mixed meters and displaced accents—hammering away. A stentorian combination of the orchestra and full organ that artfully blends the main themes leads to a lengthy cadenza for the soloist. But what a cadenza! It is scored for the pedals alone, and a dazzling display of virtuoso footwork explores just about everything that one could do on that challenging keyboard. Along with a skilled suggestion of two-part voicing, Barber amply varies the colors in the stop choices along the way. The footwork in Bach’s great toccata comes to mind, but taken here to a new level. The lengthy cadenza finally ends in a meditative quietude that leads to the re-entry of the orchestra, taking us to a kind of recapitulation of the thundering beginning of the work. A crushing dissonant cluster, of which a pipe organ is supremely the master, resolves at the conclusion to a dramatic–delightfully consonant–massive A major chord.
Toccata Festiva is not only a showpiece for the impressive array of colors of the large pipe organ, but is an apt example of the discipline and integration inherent in Barber’s musical style. He simultaneously crafts a virtuosic showpiece for the performer and the instrument, but in the context of a disciplined work informed by his legendary lyricism and an impressive economy of means. No mean feat that.
–Wm. E. Runyan
© 2025 William E. Runyan