Organ: Aeolian-Skinner op. 1301 (First Covenant Church, Oakland, CA) Deutsche Fassung der Videobeschreibung als Kommentar weiter unten! “At age twelve, [Samuel] Barber accepted a position as organist at the First Presbyterian Church [in his home town of West Chester, PA]; this employment was short lived, however, due to the young Barber’s refusal to hold fermatas in hymns and responses.” Thus says a biographical note on the composer on the website of the Library of Congress. As far as I can determine it was the only time in his life that Barber worked as an organist. Organ works form only a small part of his voluminous output. There are about fifteen, most of them written expressly for the organ. At least two are works for orchestra that the composer himself arranged for organ: the famous “Adagio for Strings” of 1936, and the piece heard here.
This chorale prelude on “Silent Night” is excerpted from a longer piece for orchestra, “Die natali” op. 37, commissioned in 1954 for the 75th season of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. That season started in the autumn of 1956, without the piece since Barber, busy with work on an opera, had not finished it. It was only on 22 December 1960 that the BSO under Charles Münch premiered it in the Boston Symphony Hall. The title has a double meaning: it is Latin both for “On the birthday” and “At Christmas” (the anniversary of the birth of Christ, hence e.g. Italian “natale” for “Christmas”). Indeed the piece, which lasts a good quarter-hour, is in fact a medley of Christmas tunes. In the following year (1961) Barber produced an organ version of the section based on “Silent Night”. As late as 1979 he wrote to Eugene Ormandy, who was apparently preparing a performance of the orchestral work: “This is a piece which has both good and bad places, and I am sure you will doctor up the bad ones to my advantage …. I particularly like the variations on ‘Silent Night’.”
The composer prescribes a four-foot reed registration for the cantus firmus in the pedals and a tempo of MM=50 for the crotchet. I confess I am not sure what exactly the idea of the piece is, or if I’m doing it right (however, the two other recordings I know did not leave me any wiser). The piece sounds quite different on the organ from the orchestral version, but I do not see how with the score as it is that could be helped. Indeed comparing the sound of the orchestral version (I have not seen the score) with the organ version I find the discrepancies more striking than the similarities, and I am not sure whether to describe the organ version as a transcription (as the score explicitly does) is quite right. Is it perhaps really more of an adaptation, highlighting different aspects than the orchestral score? A central element of the organ version (more prominent here, and unavoidably so it seems to me, than in the orchestral version) is the tension between the accompaniment with its continuous, somehow soothing progression of slow quavers, irregularly broken by pairs of semi-quavers, on the one hand, and on the other hand the deliberate “wrongness” of the rhythm: the “impossible” 7/8 time signature means that the familiar tune never quite comes to “fit” the accompaniment the way you somehow keep expecting it to. What both versions very much share is the wistful, plangent character of the harmonies.
The piece is heard here on a US-built instrument from the same period. It would be difficult to play on an older instrument or indeed (certainly in Europe) on not a few modern ones, since Barber expects a manual compass of five full octaves and a pedal compass reaching up to f1. A detailed description of the instrument is found in the video description of this video: https://youtu.be/ot8AN4rg3rE
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