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Samuel Barber Remembered: A Centenary Tribute (review)

Elie’s were played in 34 concerts in 24 cities” (p. 143). The composer died in 1991 of a brain tumor. On his deathbed, he maintained the seminal importance of The Rite of Spring and Porgy and Bess, and named among his own most significant achievements his Symphony no. 3 and The Plough. In 1999, the year of some centennial celebrations, Lehrman and his wife, soprano Helene Williams, started the Elie Sieg meister Society. The above summary represents a somewhat arbitrary distillation of what is a very densely packed essay; reading through this narrative, it is easy to lose the forest for the trees. Indeed, some of this lengthy chronicle, especially toward the end, reads as much like a Lehrman memoir as a Sieg meister biography, so that at the least, students of Lehrman’s own career will want to consult this book. (In regard to Lehrman’s strong identification with Siegmeister, the latter once told him not to call him “father,” saying, “I don’t want to get your Oedipal feelings switched to me, and it’s too pompous anyway,” p. 35.) Along these lines, the essay has a number of anecdotes and a certain informality—referring, for instance, to “Elie” and “Langston,” as opposed to Siegmeister and Hughes—at some odds with formal scholarship. But the anecdotes have their own historical importance, and the essay’s command of both musical and bibliographical sources is obviously authoritative. Following the biographical essay come some photographs (mostly snapshots, although there are a few posed portraits); a catalog of Siegmeister’s huge opus (including nine symphonies, six violin sonatas, and 159 songs) that lists not only “every known performance . . . and press article . . . about each individual work, with crossreferencing to the discography and videography” (p. x), but excepts of reviews as well, including Paul Snook’s rave of Alan Mandel’s recording of the sonatas in Fanfare (“a revelation,” “phenomenal,” etc., p. 315); books, articles, and letters, published and unpublished, by and about the composer; an alphabetical list of titles; an index of “co-creators”; and a more general index of persons and organizations. This publication seems not as userfriendly as the Blitzstein bio-bibliography, itself a challenge to maneuver around, but which at least gathers most of its information in its chronologically organized catalog of works. Here, if someone is interested in researching a particular piece, especially without knowing the date of composition, one first has to locate it in the alphabetical list of works; find the numerical code and look that up in the catalog of works, organized by genre; and then consult more codes for discographical and videographical information. Moreover, no crossreferencing or indexing provides page references to the work in the biographical essay. Some of these difficulties, almost unavoidable given the number of works Siegmeister wrote, and the amount of information squeezed into the book’s 456 pages, will be daunting for the casual user. On the other hand, serious scholars of Siegmeister’s music no doubt will learn how to navigate the book quickly enough. Whatever its limitations, this is, like Lehrman’s Blitzstein bio-bibliography, a landmark in American music scholarship, a significant book, and one that deserves to be a part of any serious music library’s collection.