Samuel Barber

Singing lessons are the key to him. Barber entered the Curtis Institute at fourteen and studied three subjects there — composition with Rosario Scalero, piano with Isabelle Vengerova and voice with Emilio de Gogorza — and the third shaped the other two, leaving him a lifelong instinct for breath, phrase length and the weight of a word. The Overture to The School for Scandal announced the orchestral voice; the slow movement of the String Quartet, arranged for string orchestra as the Adagio for Strings, showed how far restraint could carry a rising line before it had to break. Knoxville: Summer of 1915 and the Hermit Songs are the vocal masterpieces, the Violin Concerto the most played of his three concertos, and the operas the largest gambles — Vanessa a success, Antony and Cleopatra a famously difficult first night at the new Metropolitan in 1966. He took the Pulitzer Prize twice, for Vanessa in 1958 and for the Piano Concerto in 1963. Born at West Chester, Pennsylvania, in 1910, he died in New York in 1981. Horowitz, Leontyne Price and Fischer-Dieskau took up his music, as did Koussevitzky, Ormandy, Bruno Walter, Munch and Stokowski. Beside the best-known scores stand the Cello Concerto, the Capricorn Concerto, the three Essays for Orchestra and the ballet Medea, and the libretto of Antony and Cleopatra was written by his friend Menotti.