35 Facts About Dominick Argento

Dominick Argento was an American composer known for his lyric operatic and choral music.

Dominick Argento 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.

Many of Dominick Argento's works were written in Florence, where he spent a portion of every year.

Dominick Argento was a professor at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.

Dominick Argento 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.

Dominick Argento was one of the founders of the Center Opera Company.

Dominick Argento wrote fourteen operas, in addition to major song cycles, orchestral works, and many choral pieces for small and large forces.

Dominick Argento referred to his wife, the soprano Carolyn Bailey, as his muse, and she frequently performed his works.

In 2009, Dominick Argento was awarded the Brock Commission from the American Choral Directors Association.

The son of Sicilian immigrants, Dominick Argento was born and grew up in York, Pennsylvania.

Dominick Argento found his music classes in elementary school to be "fifty-minute sessions of excruciating boredom".

Dominick Argento earned bachelor's and master's degrees from Peabody, where his teachers included Nicolas Nabokov, Henry Cowell, and Hugo Weisgall.

Dominick 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 Dominick Argento later collaborated on many operas.

Dominick Argento has called the experience "life-altering;" while there, he studied briefly with Luigi Dallapiccola.

Dominick Argento established a tradition of spending long periods of time in that city.

Dominick Argento moved to Minneapolis in 1958 with his new wife, soprano Carolyn Bailey, to begin teaching theory and composition at the University of Minnesota.

Dominick Argento 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.

Dominick Argento became involved in writing music for productions at the then-new Guthrie Theater.

Dominick Argento composed the short opera The Masque of Angels for the occasion as the first Performing Arts commission of the Walker Art Center.

Dominick Argento eventually received commissions from New York City Opera, the newly formed Minnesota Opera, Washington Opera, and the Baltimore and St Louis symphonies, among others.

Dominick Argento developed close professional relationships with several prominent singers, notably Frederica von Stade, Janet Baker, and Hakan Hagegard, tailoring some of his best-known song cycles to their talents.

Dominick Argento 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.

Dominick Argento retired from teaching but retained the title of Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota until his death.

Dominick Argento collaborated with John Olon-Scrymgeour on a number of works, including The Masque of Angels; Christopher Sly, based on an episode from The Taming of the Shrew; and The Shoemaker's Holiday, a "ballad opera" based on a play by Thomas Dekker.

Dominick Argento composed Miss Havisham's Fire, with a libretto by Scrymgeour.

Dominick Argento revised Miss Havisham's Fire in 1995 and it has been successfully revived and performed since.

Dominick Argento wanted to ensure that the audience understood all the jokes.

Dominick Argento next composed The Aspern Papers as a vehicle for Frederica von Stade, with his own libretto adapted from the 1888 novella by Henry James.

Critic Anne Midgette of The New York Times has noted that Dominick Argento's operas tend to be very well received upon their premieres but lack an "easy popular hook" and are rarely revived.

One of the few major song cycles Dominick Argento has written that use "traditional" verse as a text is his popular Six Elizabethan Songs.

In 1987 Dominick Argento composed a massive Te Deum that integrates the Latin text with medieval English folk poetry.

Dominick Argento's non-vocal output is relatively small; there are no symphonies and just one string quartet, written when he was a student.

Dominick Argento produced numerous orchestral suites based on his operas, including Le tombeau d'Edgar Poe, adapted from The Voyage of Edgar Allan Poe, and the popular Valentino Dances, from The Dream of Valentino.

Dominick Argento wrote two ballets that were fashioned into orchestral suites, The Resurrection of Don Juan and Royal Invitation.