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1938 work by Samuel Barber
the composition by Samuel Barber

Adagio for Strings is a work by Samuel Barber, arguably his best known, arranged for string orchestra from the second movement of his String Quartet, Op. 11. Barber finished the arrangement in 1936, the same year that he wrote the quartet. It was performed for the first time on November 5, 1938, by Arturo Toscanini conducting the NBC Symphony Orchestra in a radio broadcast from NBC Studio 8H. Toscanini also conducted the piece on his South American tour with the NBC Symphony in 1940. Its reception has generally been positive, with Alexander J. Morin writing that Adagio for Strings is "full of pathos and cathartic passion" and that it "rarely leaves a dry eye". Barber was inspired by Virgil's didactic poem Georgics. In the quartet, the Adagio follows a violently contrasting first movement (Molto allegro e appassionato) and is succeeded by a third movement that opens with a brief reprise of the music from the first movement (marked Molto allegro (come prima) – Presto). In January 1938, Barber sent an orchestrated version of the Adagio for Strings to Arturo Toscanini. The conductor returned the score without comment, which annoyed Barber. Toscanini sent word through Menotti that he was planning to perform the piece and had returned it simply because he had already memorized it. It was reported that Toscanini did not look at the music again until the day before the premiere. On November 5, 1938, a selected audience was invited to Studio 8H in Rockefeller Center to watch Toscanini conduct the first performance; it was broadcast on radio and also recorded. Initially, the critical reception was mixed. The New York Times Olin Downes praised the piece, but he was reproached by other critics who claimed that he overrated it. Toscanini conducted Adagio for Strings in South America and Europe, the first performances of the work on both continents. Over April 16–19, 1942, the piece had public performances by the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Eugene Ormandy at Carnegie Hall. Like the original 1938 performance, these were broadcast on radio and recorded.

Adagio for Strings begins softly with a B played by the first violins. The lower strings come in two beats after the violins, which, as Johanna Keller from The New York Times put it, creates "an uneasy, shifting suspension as the melody begins a stepwise motion, like the hesitant climbing of stairs". Many recordings of the piece have a duration of about eight minutes. According to music theorist Matthew BaileyShea, the Adagio "features a deliberately archaic sound, with Renaissance like polyphony and simple tertian harmonies" underlying a "chant like melody". The work is in "the key of B minor (with some modal inflections)". The Adagio is an example of arch form and builds on a melody that first ascends and then descends in stepwise fashion. Barber subtly manipulates the pulse throughout the work by varying the primary time signature with isolated measures of , , and .

Alexander J. Morin, author of Classical Music: The Listener's Companion (2001), said that the piece was "full of pathos and cathartic passion" and that it "rarely leaves a dry eye". Reviewing the premiere performance in 1938, Olin Downes noted that with the piece, Barber "achieved something as perfect in mass and detail as his craftsmanship permits". Wayne Clifford Wentzel, author of Samuel Barber: A Research and Information Guide (Composer Resource Manuals), said that it was a piece usually selected for a closing act because it was moderately famous. Roy Brewer, writer for AllMusic, said that it was one of the most recognizable pieces of American concert music. The musicologist Bill McGlaughlin compares its role in American music to the role that Edward Elgar's "Nimrod" holds for the British. As part of a musical retrospective in 2000, NPR named Adagio for Strings one of the 100 most important American musical works of the 20th century, calling it "standard repertoire for today's orchestras, and Barber's best known work". In 2004, listeners of the BBC Radio's Today program voted Adagio for Strings the "saddest classical" work ever, ahead of "Dido's Lament" from Dido and Aeneas by Henry Purcell, the Adagietto from Gustav Mahler's 5th symphony, Metamorphosen by Richard Strauss, and Gloomy Sunday as sung by Billie Holiday.