Up for auction "Monodramas" Dominick Argento Hand Signed First Day Cover Dated 1982.
ES-7189E
Dominick
Argento (October 27, 1927
– February 20, 2019) was an American composer known for his
lyric operatic and choral music. Among his best known pieces are the operas Postcard from Morocco, Miss Havisham's Fire, The
Masque of Angels, and The Aspern Papers. He
also is known for the song cycles Six Elizabethan Songs and From the Diary of Virginia
Woolf; the latter earned him the Pulitzer Prize for Music in
1975. In a predominantly tonal context, his music freely combines tonality, atonality and
a lyrical use of twelve-tone writing. None of Argento's music approaches
the experimental, stringent avant-garde fashions of the
post-World War II era. As
a student in the 1950s, Argento divided his time between the United States and
Italy, and his music is greatly influenced by both his instructors in the
United States and his personal affection for Italy, particularly the city
of Florence. Many of Argento's works were written in Florence,
where he spent a portion of every year. He was a professor at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.
He frequently remarked that he found residents of that city to be tremendously
supportive of his work and thought his musical development would have been
impeded had he stayed in the high-pressure world of East Coast music. He
was one of the founders of the Center Opera Company (now the Minnesota Opera). Newsweek magazine once referred to the Twin Cities as
"Argento's town." Argento
wrote fourteen operas, in addition to major song cycles, orchestral works, and
many choral pieces for small and large forces. Many of these were commissioned
for and premiered by Minnesota-based artists. He referred to his wife, the
soprano Carolyn Bailey, as
his muse, and she frequently performed his works. Bailey died on
February 2, 2006. In 2009, Argento was awarded the Brock Commission from the American Choral Directors
Association. The son of Sicilian immigrants, Argento grew up in York, Pennsylvania. He
found his music classes in elementary school to be "fifty-minute sessions
of excruciating boredom". Upon graduating from high school, he was
drafted into the Army and worked for a period as a cryptographer. Following the war and using funding from
the G.I. Bill, he began studying piano performance at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore. He quickly decided to switch to composition. He
earned bachelor's (1951) and master's (1953) degrees from Peabody, where his
teachers included Nicolas Nabokov, Henry Cowell, and Hugo Weisgall. While there, he was briefly the music director
of the Hilltop Musical Company, which Weisgall founded as a sort of answer
to Benjamin Britten's
festival at Aldeburgh—a venue for local composers
(particularly Weisgall) to present new work. Argento gained broad exposure to
and experience in the world of new opera. Hilltop's stage director was the writer John
Olon-Scrymgeour, with whom Argento later collaborated on many
operas. During this period, he also spent a year in Florence on a scholarship
of the U.S.-Italy Fulbright
Commission. He has called the experience "life-altering;"
while there, he studied briefly with Luigi Dallapiccola. Argento
continued graduate studies and received his Ph.D. from the Eastman School of Music,
where he studied with Alan Hovhaness, Bernard Rogers and Howard Hanson. Following completion of this degree, he
received a Guggenheim Fellowship to
study/work for another year in Florence. He established a tradition of spending
long periods of time in that city. In the mid-1970s, Argento began writing
choral works for the choir of Plymouth Congregational Church in Minneapolis, which his
friend Philip Brunelle directed. The partnership with Brunelle was particularly
fruitful, yielding commissions and premieres at Plymouth Church and at the
Minnesota Opera, where Brunelle was Music Director. In this period Argento
composed Jonah and the Whale (1973), co-commissioned by Plymouth
Congregational Church and the Cathedral of St. Mark-Episcopal. He began to
receive larger commissions for choral works, eventually composing major pieces
for the Dale Warland Singers,
The Buffalo Philharmonic
Orchestra and Buffalo Schola Cantorum, and the Harvard and Yale glee clubs. The recording by Frederica von Stade and the
Minnesota Orchestra of his song cycle Casa Guidi won the 2004
Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition. Argento's book Catalogue
Raisonné as Memoir, an autobiographical discussion of his works, was
published in 2004. Argento retired from teaching but retained the title of
Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota until his death. He lived in
Minneapolis. The world premiere of Evensong: Of Love and Angels was
presented by the Cathedral Choral Society in
March 2008 at Washington National
Cathedral. The work was written in memory of his late wife and in
honor of the centennial of the Washington National Cathedral. In July 2014, the
choral cycle "Seasons," setting texts by friend Pat Solstad, was
premiered by the Minnesota Beethoven Festival Chorale in Winona,
Minnesota, under the direction of longtime friend Dale Warland.