The saddest music ever written : the story of Samuel Barber's Adagio for strings / Thomas Larson.

Author: Larson, Thomas, 1949-

Edition Statement:1st Pegasus Books cloth ed.

Imprint:New York : Pegasus Books : Distributed by W.W. Norton, 2010.

Descriptionx, 262 p. ; 24 cm.

Note:Prelude -- The pieta of music -- The adagio's emotional history -- A great future behind him -- One Austrian summer, 1936 -- The Toscanini premiere -- My father's fate -- How to describe the adagio -- The composition of sorrow -- A gay collaboration -- Barber's symphonic dilemma -- My father's war -- That melancholic strain -- My grandmother's safety -- From Knoxville to Kierkegaard -- How to play the adagio -- The expression of sorrow -- A pair of operas -- Barber's last years -- My mother's grace -- The adagio as sound image -- The musical legacy -- The mystery of the icon -- At the grave -- Works consulted, works quoted -- Thanks -- Notes.

Bibliography Note:Includes bibliographical references.

Note:Explores the history and influence of Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings, which has become a seminal funeral hymn, and contains a sadness mirrored in the composer's own melancholic life of alcoholism and depression.

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