When Samuel Barber died in 1981 his name may not have been as familiar to a wide public as George Gershwin’s, or even Aaron Copland’s. But he could equal, or even surpass them, in the success achieved by one of his compositions, the Adagio for Strings: a “crossover” hit long before that expression had gained currency.

The Adagio for Strings is connected with one of the great names in conducting, Arturo Toscanini, who presented its world premiere with his NBC Symphony on a nationwide broadcast (November 5, 1938) and then took it, as the only work by an American composer, on a tour of South America with the orchestra.

It was a success from the start, but not as music for a large string orchestra. The piece began life as the slow movement—marked “Molto adagio”—of Barber’s only string quartet, written in 1936 while its composer was a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome. The premiere of that work compared in glamor to that of the orchestral slow movement two years later, the performers being the Pro Arte Quartet, as celebrated in their intimate world as Toscanini was in his vast arena.

Music of austere grandeur, the Adagio, in the composer’s own arrangement for string orchestra, has become widely associated with solemn occasions, among them the funerals of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Albert Einstein, and Princess Grace of Monaco. It reached its widest audiences, however, as the background leitmotif in Oliver Stone’s 1986 Vietnam War film Platoon.

The seven-minute-long score has only that single, memorable theme, announced by, and rising step-wise in, the first violins, repeated by the violas—in canonic imitation—then given to the cellos, who darken the mood even further, whereafter the violins soar to an anguished, high-register climax before a dramatic pause, ushering in a final repetition of the theme by violins and the violas in octaves before the quiet, reverential close.

— Herbert Glass