Nonfiction | September 01, 2010
The Saddest Music Ever Written: Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings
Thomas Larson
The full text of this essay is not currently available online.
Barber’s Adagio is the Pietá of music. It captures the sorrow and the pity of tragic death: listening to it, we are Mother Mary, come alive-holding the lifeless Christ on our laps, one arm bracing the slumped head, the other offering him to the ages. The Adagio is a sound shrine to music’s power to evoke emotion. Its elegiac descent is among the most moving expressions of grief in any art. The snail-like tempo, the constrained melodic line, its rise and fall, the periodic rests, the harmonic repetition, the harmonic color, the uphill slog, the climactic moment of its peaked eruption-all are crafted together into one magnificent effect: listeners, weeping in anguish, bear the glory and gravity of their grief. No sadder music has ever been written.
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