Adagio for Strings

Adagio for Strings, orchestra arrangement of the second movement of American composer Samuel Barber’s String Quartet (1936). It premiered on November 5, 1938. It has long been associated in the United States with national periods of mourning, having been performed at the funerals of U.S. presidents (Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy) and in the days following the September 11 attacks in 2001. It was also part of the film score for Oliver Stone’s Academy Award-winning film Platoon (1986).

The Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini first brought the Adagio for Strings to wide public attention. Impressed by some of Barber’s works that he had heard in performance in Europe, he asked Barber for music that his NBC Symphony might perform. Barber provided the scores for two short works: his Essay for Orchestra (to be the first of three such “essays”) and the Adagio for Strings. Toscanini premiered both works with the NBC Symphony in a broadcast concert and recorded the Adagio soon after.

The work is built largely upon an ascending three-note motif and stretches out the repetition of that motif over broadly spacious phrases with dynamics that—like the shape of the melodic phrase itself—rise and fall. All the string parts, including the basses (which would not have appeared in the original string-quartet version), take turns with the deeply melancholy melody. As the music proceeds, phrases become longer and move higher in range, lending a sense of increased intensity. A brief moment of silence appears before the last restatements of the theme. In 1967 Barber crafted a new version of the Adagio: setting to it the text of the ancient prayer Agnus Dei and intending it for chorus, with or without keyboard accompaniment. The original String Quartet, Op. 11, from which the Adagio was derived, premiered in Rome on December 14, 1936. Thus, its melodies feature at opposite ends of Barber’s career.