John Corigliano is an American composer of classical music. The son of a violinist, studied at Columbia University, before embarking on a varied musical career. As a composer, his earlier works develop further the musical language of composers such as Samuel Barber, Aaron Copland and their contemporaries, followed by a period of wider experiment in the use of more varied musical materials. His opera The Ghosts of Versailles was staged at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 1992