Composer, born in West Chester, Pennsylvania, USA. From a musical family, Barber decided on his career in childhood and attended the Curtis Institute of Music from 1924--34. There he wrote the orchestral works The School for Scandal and Music for a Scene from Shelly, which gained him attention in America and Europe. His Adagio for Strings, premiered by Toscanini in 1938, was an immediate hit and remains his best-known score. In the late 1930s Barber joined the Curtis faculty; he left teaching and served in the military from 1942. After the war he settled into a house in Mt Kisco, NY, with composer Gian-Carlo Menotti, who wrote the libretto to Barber's opera Vanessa (1958). His music, long popular with listeners, is marked by a classical clarity often joined to a late-Romantic wistfulness; later work, such as the Piano Concerto (a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1963) uses more modernistic techniques without giving up Barber's basic expressiveness. Antony and Cleopatra, written for the opening of the new Metropolitan Opera in 1966, was a celebrated failure, although later productions of a revised version fared better.