Dominick Argento

Who is Dominick Argento?

Dominick Argento is an American composer, best known for his lyric operatic and choral music. Among his best known pieces are the operas Postcard from Morocco, Miss Havisham's Fire, and The Masque of Angels, The Aspern Papers, as well as 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, though none of Argento's music approaches the experimental avant garde fashions of the post World War II era. He is particularly well known for sensitive settings of complex, sophisticated texts.

As a student in the 1950s, Argento divided his time between America and Italy, and his music is greatly influenced both by 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 spends a portion of every year. He has been a professor at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, and he frequently remarks that he finds that city to be tremendously supportive of his work and that he thinks 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, and indeed Newsweek once referred to the Twin Cities as "Argento's town."