Samuel Barber studied as a baritone and composer with Scalero at the Curtis Institute and while there began to win acclaim with such works as Drover Beach (1931), written for himself to sing with string quartet.

His opulent yet unforced Romanticism struck a chord and during the 1930s he was much in demand: his overture The School for Scandal (1933), First Symphony (1936), First Essay (1937) and Adagio (originally the second movement of his String Quartet, 1936) were widely performed, the lyrical, elegiac Adagio remaining a popular classic.

In the 1940s he began to include more 'modern' features of harmony and scoring. Of his operas, Vanessa (1958), praised as 'highly charged with emotional meaning', was more successful than Antony and Cleopatra (1966, for the opening of the new Met).