Samuel Barber, Overture to The School for Scandal

Program Notes of November 14, 2009

SAMUEL BARBER
Born West Chester, PA, 9 March 1910. Died New York, 23 January 1981.
OVERTURE TO THE SCHOOL FOR SCANDAL, OP. 5
Composed in 1931 and first performed on August 30, 1933 by the Philadelphia Orchestra, with Alexander Smallens conducting. The score calls for piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, cymbals, triangle, bells, celesta, harp and strings. The work lasts approximately 8 minutes.

The function of a musical form often plays a major role in our sense of its meaning. So it is with the "overture." When we speak of an "overture" in the language of social affairs, we mean an initial gesture to open some form of interaction or negotiation. The same is true of a musical overture. In the early days of this genre, for example, a very popular form was the so-called "French overture," a stately piece using dotted rhythms, derived from the formal processional into the king's court, where matters of state were argues and settled. Baroque composers, especially, liked to lend this sense of gravitas to the opening of their oratorios, dance suites, and operas. (Händel's Messiah, for example, opens with a French Overture.) As the opera became increasingly popular, the overture became especially associated with the stage. The overture served to focus our attention and gave us a sense of the profundity of the drama that was about to unfold.

In the course of the three hundred years between the Baroque Age and Samuel Barber's Twentieth Century, the overture would evolve from a formal statement of gravitas into a deeply personal insight into the tensions and emotions of the characters we were about to meet on stage. The opening measures of Wagner's overture to Tristan and Isolde, for example, express a wave of the unfulfilled longing, an expression of the passion which will drive those ill-fated lovers to their doom. We have come a considerable distance from the French Overture.

Soon overtures were played alone as concert pieces, borrowed from their operas. Typically, an overture might open a symphony concert of varied numbers, like ours this evening, because of the overture's character of preparing us for an impending event. Some overtures and incidental music were written not for operas, but for spoken plays. Beethoven wrote his Egmont overture and incidental music for a performance of that play by Wolfgang Goethe. Samuel Barber's Overture to The School for Scandal presents us with a curious variant of the function of the overture. A student of composition at the time, Barber wrote his overture with a specific play in mind, but without any intention of performing the music with the play. He gives us the sense of the function of an overture without the actual function.

Perhaps that is ironically appropriate to the play at hand, or rather, not at hand. Richard Brinsley Shirdan's 1777 satire, The School for Scandal, is a comedic masterpiece that pokes fun of the social conventions of the time, and the pretentions of the elite. Two of the plays leading characters are called Lady Sneerwell and Sir Benjamin Backbite.

Barber's music expresses the same ironic charm as his literary inspiration, but otherwise makes no explicit reference to the play other than its title. That in itself seems delightfully ironic. But Barber wrote his "overture" at the beginning of a Twentieth Century that, like his Eighteenth Century inspiration, was challenging not only the social conventions of the time, but also its musical conventions. Thus we hear in the Overture to The School for Scandal the innovations that were leading us beyond the musical form and harmony of the Nineteenth Century.