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.
Early life and education
The son of Sicilian immigrants, Argento was born and 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.
Minnesota years
Argento moved to Minneapolis in 1958 with his new wife, soprano Carolyn Bailey, to begin teaching theory and composition at the University of Minnesota. His students there included composer Marjorie Rusche. Within a few years, he received commissions from virtually every major performing group there. He has remarked that this constant feeling of strong community interest in his work made him feel particularly at home in Minnesota, although he had at first resisted moving there. For several years, he hoped to find a position on his native East Coast.
Argento became involved in writing music for productions at the then-new Guthrie Theater. In 1963, he and Scrymgeour founded the Center Opera Company, which later became the Minnesota Opera, to be in residence at the Guthrie. Argento composed the short opera The Masque of Angels for the occasion as the first Performing Arts commission of the Walker Art Center. This work—with its complex harmonic language and an emphasis on expansive choral writing that prefigures his later role as a prominent choral composer—firmly established his local prominence, as well as providing a role for his wife.