I watched David Lynch’s The Elephant Man last night, and was surprised to hear this piece played towards the end. I’ve always associated the slow swelling of the Adagio with the death of Elias in Platoon, but it’s appeared in more films than I’d previously thought. A cursory look at the Wikipedia page (as always) tells me it has long seeped into popular culture through more channels than the movies. Truth be told, I probably heard it first on The Simpsons.
Samuel Barber, who was Irish-American and thus stakes a claim for the only appearance of an Irishman in classical music (I await correction on this), is really only remembered for this composition, though that probably does the man a disservice. Influenced by Bach and Brahms, he represented more an evolution of classical music than an original voice, and experimented with different genres such as jazz later in his career, which ran from the 1930s on.
Barber was a closeted homosexual, served in the Air Corps in WW2, and went into a depression-fuelled isolation for several years after his Opera for Antony & Cleopatra did not meet the critical acclaim he felt it deserved. I’ve never heard any of his other work, but only 27 years after his death in 1981, Barber has at least contributed one vital piece to the classical Canon.
The piece is quite repetitive around a central theme – in classical music lingo this is referred to as “arch form”. The melody quivers up the note scale, first with violins, then cellos, and finally with violas. As it moves up the register, the notes become almost drone-like, It starts quite slow-paced, but builds up noticeably as it comes to each crescendo. After the first peak is a slight fall-off down the register and a silence, which only adds to the sheer mournfulness of the composition. Little wonder that it was played at the funeral of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
The piece was most famously used as Willem Dafoe’s Elias runs from the Vietnam jungle before being cut down by enemy fire, and falls into the famous Jesus Christ pose that we see on the cover of Platoon. It’s also used in the moving final scene of The Elephant Man, where John Merrick (John Hurt’s eyes and lots of makeup) lies down and dies, having just received a standing ovation. It was also voted “Saddest Classical Work Ever” by BBC listeners.
‘Adagio for Strings’ is also well-known from remixes performed by DJ Tiesto and William Orbit, and it’s to its testament that it fits so appositely to dance music. Toscanini, one of the greatest conductors of all, performed it in its first rehearsal, and could only say: “Semplice e bella”. Simple and beautiful.
You can hear the piece on YouTube here, along with some scenes from Lynch’s movies. And if you get a chance, rent out The Elephant Man. It’s the second David Lynch movie I’ve seen in a fortnight, and it’s a disturbing but compelling show, and one of the best English movies I’ve ever seen from an American director.
