Gian Carlo Menotti (1911–2007) was one of the most successful opera composers of the mid-twentieth century. He had an inborn sense of the theater, inheriting the tradition of Puccini, with an intuitive feel for character and drama as a fusion of music and theater to his own texts—almost all in English. Menotti remained Italian to the core, even though he spent most of his life based in America before, improbably, buying a country mansion in Scotland. The relationship between Menotti and Barber was crucial to the development of both composers—their work is at the core of mid-twentieth-century music as perceived by a wide public—so Menotti's background is particularly relevant to any study of Barber.

Menotti was born in Cadegliano, on Lake Lugano, on July 7, 1911, and died in Monte Carlo on February 1, 2007. He was the sixth of eight surviving children in a large family network. His mother, Ines, was the predominant parental influence; she gave her children the chance to learn various instruments and pampered Gian Carlo. Samuel Barber, Menotti's almost lifelong partner, felt she was “made to be the heroine of a Puccini opera.”

When his family moved to Milan, Gian Carlo was a regular attendee at theaters as well as opera at La Scala. As he explained, it was a surprise when his mother decided to send him to the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. Another shock was the death of Menotti's father and his mother's remarriage to a much younger man. The couple went to live in South America and, in 1928, left Menotti in Philadelphia at age seventeen.

By a charmed coincidence, he encountered Barber. At Curtis they shared a composition teacher, Rosario Scalero, benefiting from his solid traditional approach. Then the two young composers went out to explore the world together. In 1934 they spent the winter in Vienna. Two years later they took a cottage in St. Wolfgang for the summer, where Menotti wrote Amelia al ballo (Amelia Goes to the Ball) based on familiar scenes from Austrian life, and Barber wrote his String Quartet, out of which would come his celebrated Adagio for Strings. The premiere of Amelia was at the Philadelphia Academy, and the New York production a few days later was so successful that the Met offered to produce it—in a double bill with Strauss's Elektra—in 1938.