Master of modern opera dies at 91
Song cycle won Pulitzer prize
Dominick Argento, a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer who was likely the most celebrated creator of new American operas between the heyday of Gian Carlo Menotti in the 1950s and the advent of Philip Glass in the 1970s, died Feb. 20 at his home in Minneapolis, where he had lived for six decades. He was 91.
His music publisher, Boosey & Hawkes, announced his death. The cause was not disclosed.
Argento was always a force apart. He belonged to no compositional school, preferring a distinctly eclectic language that appealed both intellectually and emotionally to his audiences. At a time when most of the celebrated American composers were based on either the East or West Coast, where they could work together and help promote each other’s music, Argento lived and worked in Minneapolis throughout his career, teaching composition at the University of Minnesota and working closely for many years with the director Sir Tyrone Guthrie at what became the Guthrie Theater.
In 1976, Argento spoke of his passion for the singing voice for ASCAP Magazine: “The voice is not just another instrument. It’s the instrument par excellence, the original instrument, a part of the performer rather than an adjunct to him.”
In all, he wrote a dozen operas, including “Christopher Sly” (1963), “Postcard from Morocco” (1971), “The Voyage of Edgar Allan Poe” (1976), “Miss Havisham’s Fire” (1979) “Casanova’s Homecoming” (1984) and “The Aspern Papers” (1988). Several of these works have entered the repertory.
It was a song cycle called “From the Diary of Virginia Woolf,” a setting of eight entries from Woolf’s diaries, that won Argento the Pulitzer Prize in 1976. He later said that this was a “piece that, when it was finished, was even better than I’d hoped for.”
The world premiere took place in Minneapolis with the distinguished English soprano Janet Baker as the soloist.
When asked by High Fidelity how he felt when the work received one of music’s highest honors, he replied: “The Pulitzer Prize? You mean Christmas in May. I did not even know the piece had been submitted.”