Dominick Argento, Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, dead at 91
Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Dominick Argento died in Minneapolis, Minn., after a short illness; his death was announced by his family.
He was 91. Argento was best known for his lyrical and astringent music for the human voice — he wrote 13 operas, as well as song cycles and choral works. As he told the late Mary Ann Feldman in a 2002 interview, “My interest is people. I am committed to working with characters, feelings and emotions.”
According to npr.org, his career was well underway throughout the ‘60s, but it was his 1971 surrealist chamber opera, ‘Postcard from Morocco’, that cemented Argento’s reputation as one of the leading composers of his generation; after its premiere in Minneapolis, the opera was staged around the world.
Argento’s operas were often based on literary works or themes: ‘The Voyage of Edgar Allan Poe’, about the author’s tragic final days; ‘Miss Havisham’s Wedding Night’, based on a Dickens character from ‘Great Expectations’; ‘Casanova’s Homecoming’, a comic opera set in Venice, which had a well-reviewed run at the New York City Opera; and ‘The Aspern Papers’, drawn from a Henry James novella and written for star mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade. Argento’s final opera, ‘The Dream of Valentino’, set in the early days of Hollywood, premiered at the Kennedy Center in 1994.
Some of his earliest compositions were settings of poetry: E.E. Cummings, Shelley, Wordsworth. But the Pulitzer Prize he was awarded in 1975, for an eight-song cycle written for English mezzo-soprano Dame Janet Baker, used some lesser-known material as its foundation: Entries collected in ‘From the Diary of Virginia Woolf’ to explore the emotions and thoughts of the famously troubled novelist.