Dominick Argento

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Dominick Argento (born 27 October 1927, York, Pennsylvania) is an American composer, best known as a leading composer of lyric opera.

Argento is the son of Italian immigrants. He earned bachelor's and master's degrees from the Peabody Conservatory, where his teachers included Nicholas Nabokov, Henry Cowell, and Hugo Weisgall. Argento received his Ph.D. from the Eastman School of Music, where he studied with Alan Hovhaness, Bernard Rogers and Howard Hanson. He also briefly studied in Italy with Luigi Dallapiccola.

Argento has written fourteen operas, major song cycles, orchestral works, and many choral pieces. In a predominantly tonal context, his music freely combines tonality, atonality and a lyrical use of twelve-tone writing, though none of Argento's music approaches the experimental avant garde fashions of the post World War II era. He was a professor of music for more than 40 years at the University of Minnesota, teaching composition, history of opera and orchestration. Besides an international reputation, his music has been an especially integral part of artistic life in Minneapolis/St. Paul since the 1960s. For most of his adult life, Argento spent summers in Florence, Italy, where he composed a great deal of his music. His wife Carolyn Bailey was a soprano who performed many of his early works.

Argento was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1975 for his song cycle "From the Diary of Virginia Woolf". The recording by Frederica Von Stade and the Minnesota Orchestra of his song cycle for mezzo-soprano and orchestra, "Casa Guidi", settings of letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, won the 2004 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition. Argento's book Catalogue Raisonne as Memoir, an autobiographical discussion of his works, was published in 2004.

Argento's operas, solo vocal music and choral pieces show an unusually sophisticated literate taste. He wrote his own librettos for his later operas. His compositions are always well-crafted, and his orchestrations are evidence of a fine ear for musical textures. No other American composer of opera has sustained such a high quality of output for the stage in a large body of work. Postcard from Morocco was the opera that first created his national and international reputation. Prominent productions have been Casanova's Homecoming for the opening of the Ordway Theater in St. Paul, The Aspern Papers, written for the talents of Frederica Von Stade, at Dallas Opera and broadcast on PBS, The Voyage of Edgar Allan Poe at Lyric Opera of Chicago, Casanova's Homecoming at New York City Opera, and The Dream of Valentino at Washington Opera. His one critical failure, Miss Havisham's Fire, premiered at New York City Opera in 1979, was redeemed in a highly praised revised version produced at St. Louis Opera in 2001. Argento's operas have also been produced in Europe, particularly in Germany.

Like his operas, Argento's songs are distinctive for vocal lyricism and exquisitely sensitive text settings. After the early song cyles Songs about Spring (e.e. cummings poetry, soprano and piano), and Six Elizabethan Songs (English Renaissance poetry, high voice and piano; a voice with chamber ensemble version also), his song composition innovatively turned to prose for texts: Letters from Composers (1968, tenor and guitar); To Be Sung upon the Water (1974, tenor, clarinet, piano); From the Diary of Virginia Woolf (1975), composed for mezzo-soprano Janet Baker; The Andree Expedition (1983), composed for baritone Hakan Hagegard; Casa Guidi (1983, with orchestra; voice and piano version also), composed for mezzo-soprano Frederica Von Stade; A Few Words about Chekhov (1996), composed for Frederica Von Stade and Hakan Hagegard; and Miss Manners on Music (1998, mezzo-soprano and piano).