American composer Samuel Barber wrote the “Adagio for Strings” in 1936, at the age of 26, as the third movement in his string quartet (Opus 11) while summering in an Austrian chalet with his longtime partner and librettist Gian Carlo Menotti. Barber finished the piece toward the end of their stay, writing to friend and cellist Orlando Cole, “I have just finished the slow movement of my quartet today—it is a knockout!” In January of 1938 the composer mailed the score to conductor Arturo Toscanini, perhaps the most well known musician in the country at the time thanks to his popular weekly radio show conducting the NBC Orchestra. To Barber’s dismay, Toscanini returned the score without comment and it was only some time later that the composer would find out that Toscanini, a preternaturally gifted conductor, had already memorized the score and planned to premiere it, which he did, on November 5, 1938 in New York, broadcast to millions of listeners. 

Its first quiet tones slowly and mournfully faded into being. Long notes betrayed a confident, unapologetic lyricism and an unfussy sincerity that billowed into the minds and hearts of the listeners before finally the great swelling suspensions of the third phrase—a piercing kaleidoscope held in a breathless climax—collapsed in on itself, leaving only a few stray elegiac embers smoldering. It remained un-resolved as it drifted into silence. 

The following morning longtime New York Times classical critic Olin Downes wrote of the “Adagio,” “we have here honest music, by a musician not striving for pretentious effect, not behaving as a writer would who, having a clear, short, popular word handy for his purpose, got the dictionary and fished out a long one.” An auspicious beginning for a piece of music that a 2004 BBC Today radio audience voted as the single saddest piece of music ever, beating out other top nominated contenders Gloomy Sunday by Billie Holiday, Mahler’s 5th Symphony, Purcell’s Dido’s Lament, and Richard Strauss’ Metamorphosen. But the “Adagio” was more-or-less instantly welcomed into the small cluster of compositions that can be called American masterworks. It was aired on the radio when presidents Frank Delano Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy died, and it was played at the funerals for Albert Einstein and Princess Grace of Monaco. It was used by director David Lynch—who called the piece “pure magic”—in the tragic finale of his 1980 film Elephant Man, and achieved even greater reach when director Oliver Stone used it in a pivotal scene of his tense 1986 Academy Award-winning Vietnam drama, Platoon—though Barber’s longtime partner Menotti believed that the composer “would not have been amused” by the music’s success via the film, and “might not even have allowed the Adagio to be used.” 

By the end of the 1990s it had become so intertwined with tragedy that it became an easy target for parody on shows like Seinfeld, The Simpsons, and South Park. The Adagio has been arranged for organ, chorus, woodwinds, marimba, electric guitar, brass band, and clarinet choir, and the elegiac composition has been reworked by techno artists William Orbit, Tiesto and Ferry Corsten, whose remix of Orbit’s arrangement paraded into the British singles charts (leaving much of the music’s forthright beauty behind), peaking at No. 4. Sean Combs (then Puff Daddy, now just Diddy) even used a recording of Barber’s own vocal transcription of the song for extended versions of his 1997 hit, “I’ll Be Missing You,” written in memory of Notorious B.I.G. 

The song was ubiquitous following the events of 9/11 and accompanied any number of memorials. Conductor Leonard Slatkin called it “the classical music world’s sound of grief” and composer William Schuman said of it, “I think it works because it’s so precise emotionally,” adding, “it’s never a warhorse; when I hear it played I’m always moved by it.” The New Yorker critic Alex Ross summed it up astutely when he wrote, “Whenever the American dream suffers a catastrophic setback, Barber’s ‘Adagio for Strings’ plays on the radio.” Toscanini’s premiere has since been selected for permanent preservation as part of the Library of Congress National Recording Registry.

Some of the magic of the Adagio is the mystery behind its origins as Barber never revealed what drove him to create such an awesome monument to sorrow. More of its magic is rooted in Barber’s populist leanings, the composer saying that he wished to “write good music that will be comprehensible to as many people as possible. To achieve that aim he looked to aggressively instigate the heart, saying, “The universal basis of artistic spiritual communication by means of art is through the emotions.” Though Barber pocketed the Pulitzer Prize twice in his lifetime; once in 1957 for his opera Vanessa and again in 1962 for his piano concerto, and was responsible for a rich and complete catalog ranking him among the most important classical composers to come out of America, but his legacy remains largely caged by the enormity of the Adagio.