Agnus Dei

Samuel Barber’s Agnus Dei began its life as the slow movement of his String Quartet Op.11, which was first performed in Rome in 1936. Although it made little impression on that occasion, it was destined for worldwide popularity from the moment that Toscanini first performed it as an Adagio for strings with the NBC Symphony Orchestra in New York in 1938. Nearly 30 years later the composer had the brilliant idea of adapting as a setting of the Agnus Dei, from the Latin Mass, for mixed chorus with piano or organ accompaniment. The words and the music, which latter had always owed its popularity to its mystic church-like atmosphere, might have been written for each other. Based on one theme – the melody which grows so naturally out of the quietly sustained single note sung by the sopranos in the first bar – it is an essentially vocal, chant-like inspiration that rises like a prayer to an impassioned climax and falls back into contemplation at the end.