Essay No.1, Op.12

While Samuel Barber was not short of influential supporters in the early stages of his career, no one did more to enhance his reputation than Arturo Toscanini. It was the great Italian conductor’s broadcasts of the Adagio for Strings and the Essay for Orchestra with the NBC Symphony Orchestra in 1938 – when the composer was still in his twenties – that made an American national hero of him. Those who know the Adagio will recognise the same composer in the opening bars of the Essay – a similarly serious, even solemn melody winding slowly round the string section. The difference is that this work is scored not only for strings but for the whole orchestra, which makes its presence emphatically felt in an agitated episode quite unlike anything in the Adagio, in brass fanfares and, most unexpectedly, in a fleeting scherzo for pattering strings, woodwind and a discreet piano at one point. The opening theme is not forgotten, however, as we hear when it is drawn across the background in horn colours and, later, brought briefly but firmly into the foreground by the whole orchestra.