RELAXED CONCERT: APPALACHIAN SPRING

It’s an amusing accident of history that Barber’s Adagio, one of the totems of American music, was composed in Austria (where Barber was spending the summer and autumn with Gian-Carlo Menotti) and first performed on 14 December 1936 at a concert in Rome (as the slow movement of the String Quartet Op.11). Barber was delighted with this movement, describing it to his friend Orlando Cole as ‘a knockout!’ While finishing the whole quartet, he arranged the Adagio as an independent movement for string orchestra and this was first performed in 1938 in a broadcast concert in New York given by the NBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Arturo Toscanini. Barber’s fellow composer Aaron Copland spoke about the piece in 1982 for a BBC radio programme, praising ‘the sense of continuity, the steadiness of the flow, the satisfaction of the arch … from beginning to end. It’s gratifying, satisfying, and it makes you believe in the sincerity which he obviously put into it.’

Nigel Simeone 2014

It was the patron Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge who commissioned Aaron Copland to compose a new ballet for Martha Graham’s dance company in 1943, for performance in the Coolidge Auditorium (named after her) at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C.. Copland was delighted with the idea, particularly after Graham sent him the first version of her scenario concerning a young married couple in rural Pennsylvania. The ballet went through various titles during the composition process, and Copland’s manuscript was simply headed ‘Ballet for Martha’, but Graham settled on ‘Appalachian Spring’ just before the premiere, taking the title from a poem by Hart Crane. One of the attractions for Copland was the challenge of writing for an ensemble of 12 instruments (the largest group that could fit into the very small pit in the Coolidge Auditorium), and the result was described in a review of the first performance by the ballet critic John Martin as ‘a score of fresh and singing beauty. It is, on its surface, a piece of early Americana, but in reality, it is a celebration of the human spirit.’ Copland himself was typically self-effacing, admitting that ‘people seemed to like it, so I guess it was all right.’ In 1945 he made a very successful arrangement for large orchestra, but the sound of the original has a beauty and intimacy all its own. Copland decided quite early on to use the Shaker tune ‘Simple Gifts’ (written in 1848), and this melody is woven through much of the score, notably in the set of variations. But while the score perfectly matches the ‘local’ elements of the story, it also transcends them to become a piece of universal appeal: Copland’s great achievement in Appalachian Spring is to have created a quiet and heartfelt vision of hope in troubled times.

Nigel Simeone 2024