Catalogue Raisonné as Memoir
by Dominick Argento
University of Minnesota Press
Dominick Argento has often joked that he and his wife, Carolyn, didn't
unpack their bags for two years upon moving to Minneapolis. He hoped that a
position would open up on the East or West Coast, certain that remaining in
Minneapolis would be artistic suicide for a young composer.
"Gradually, that fear evaporated," Argento notes in his
gracefully written Catalogue Raisonné as Memoir recently published by
the University of Minnesota Press. As the book suggests, Argento, currently the
Minnesota Orchestra's composer emeritus, prospered on the prairie. Having called
Minneapolis home since he accepted a job at the University of Minnesota in 1958,
he stayed mostly immune from the compositional fads of the day, and he
encountered in the Twin Cities not just a host of organizations willing to
commission works from him, but an audience that wanted to hear contemporary
music. The book is dedicated to Schubert Club manager Bruce Carlson, who
commissioned the song cycle From the Diary of Virginia Woolf, which earned Argento the 1975 Pulitzer Prize.
Argento has spent much of the past half-century developing one of the most distinctive voices — and careers — in U.S. music, principally in the field of opera. And nearly all of his work was composed and performed in Minneapolis.
Catalogue Raisonné is simple in form, brief essays on 50 or so works that Argento composed from 1950 to 2002. They include Songs About Spring, which Carolyn Argento, a soprano, premiered at the Peabody Conservatory in 1951 with her husband at the piano; Orpheus, a short piece for treble voices premiered in New York City two years ago, and a five-minute organ prelude composed for Plymouth Congregational Church (which he wrote despite an admitted hatred of organ music).
Argento balks at explaining what actually happens in the creative act, except to say that "When I emerge from a composition session, I feel as if I'm awakening from a trance or an anesthetic."
As for his teachers, he calls the prolific Alan Hovhaness "a tall, lean butterfly pollinating a field of flowers." He revered Hugo Weisgall, who turned Argento in the direction of opera in the mid-1950s, a time when no U.S. composers save Gian Carlo Menotti were focused on the stage. He also characterizes his relationship to the Minnesota Orchestra's various music directors, pre-Osmo Vänskä: Stanislaw Skrowaczewski (courtly), Neville Marriner (friendly), Edo de Waart (glacial), Eiji Oue (the best).
Settling a score
Argento also gets even. (Isn't that a primary impetus for any memoir?) He explains his 40-year grudge against the Minnesota Opera, of which he was a co-founder back in 1963–64 when Center Opera premiered his Masque of Angels and he had dreams of the company's becoming his own musical laboratory. While Argento was in Europe, the company went in a different direction, stressing the visual over the musical, in the composer's view. (Moral: Never leave town when you're sitting on a new theatrical venture.) Later, in 1976, he had planned that his wife would sing the soprano lead in The Voyage of Edgar Allen Poe, but the director replaced her. And then, for the opening of the Ordway Center in 1985, the vaudeville flop Animalen was put in place of Argento's Casanova's Homecoming, which turned out to be a hit.
His biggest failure, he says, was Miss Havisham's Fire, premiered by the New York City Opera in 1979; one of his most fondly remembered successes is Postcard From Morocco, premiered by the Minnesota Opera in 1972, in which Argento says he found his compositional voice.
Argento admits to being a traditionalist, with "melody and lyricism" as his beacons. He cites Frederica von Stade as his favorite singer, at least of his own works, and he names the qualities he wishes to put into his music: beauty, intelligence, genuineness, absence of showiness, humanity. It's hard to imagine that any of the other 10,000 or so living composers out there hope for the opposite in their work (if so, don't let the National Endowment for the Arts hear about it). Still, there's no denying that Argento has been true to his vision. His compositional voice isn't loud, but it is subtle and persuasive, as is the voice that comes through so clearly in this lovely memoir.
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