Tenth Muse Preview | Dominick Argento & Virginia Woolf
- Leah Froyd
- 1 hour ago
- 5 min read
Hello and welcome back to our third installment of our preview for Tenth Muse coming up later this month! We are pivoting to the contemporary world of Dominick Argento (1927-2019) and his muse Virginia Woolf, who inspired his piece on our program.
Dominick Argento
Argento was best known for his vocal music; he composed 13 operas over his lifetime. He married the soprano, Carolyn Bailey, who was a collaborative partner and premiered many of his works. The drive to create vocal music also served his love for literature. Many of his music were based on the works of literary figures like Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, and Henry James as well as on poetry by e.e. cummings, Shelly, and Wordsworth.
In his memoir, Argento likened his creative process to the love of raising a child:
"A parent inculcates ideas, develops tastes, provides guidance… and in effect molds the child from birth through its early years. But the child soon develops its own ideas, cultivates its own tastes, resists external guidance, and ultimately becomes its own master, often with unanticipated results. My compositions, like children, have surprised me that way.”
— Argento, Catalogue Raisonnâe as Memoir: A Composer's Life
In addition to composing, Argento was a strong advocate for the contemporary arts. He was instrumental in bringing the contemporary arts to Minnesota as a founding member of the Minnesota Opera. The feature below includes a few excerpts from his operas as well as interviews with Argento and his colleagues.
Diaphenia | Six Elizabethan Songs
Diaphenia, like the daffadowndilly,
White as the sun, fair as the lily, Heigh ho, how I do love thee!
I do love thee as my lambs
Are belovèd of their dams: How blest were I if thou would'st prove me.
Diaphenia, like the spreading roses,
That in thy sweets all sweets encloses, Fair sweet, how I do love thee!
I do love thee as each flower
Loves the sun's life-giving power; For dead, thy breath to life might move me.
Diaphenia, like to all things blessèd,
When all thy praises are expressèd, Dear joy, how I do love thee!
As the birds do love the spring,
Or the bees their careful king, -- Then in requite, sweet virgin, love me!
In this energetic movement from his collection of Six Elizabethan Songs, we can hear the excitement of the narrator. The rolling piano in constant eighth notes frames an equally active melodic line. Listen for the way the singer’s voice makes frequent jumps and how the piano’s interjections are punchy because the composer marks them stacatto (short) and accented. This creates vibrant images of spring signifying the persona of Diaphenia as bright as the sun, and as beautiful as the daffodil, lily, and lamb.
There is a moment where the energetic music breaks where the voice and piano’s movement becomes much more calm during the line, “For dead, thy breath to life might move me”. The conviction of the love poem is conveyed— for at the end of the poem, it’s revealed that the poet is unsure if his feelings are reciprocated: in fact, the whole poem has been a confession or plea to have her return his feelings.
The Diary of Virginia Woolf | Rome by Dominick Argento
Virginia Woolf was an important literary figure of the 20th century. In addition to her novels, she also wrote many essays about art, gender studies, and politics. In her adolescence, she suffered the death of her mother when Virginia was 13, the death of her sister two years later, and the death of her father just a few years following. After the death of their father, Virginia and her siblings moved to the Bloomsbury district in London— at the time it was a hub for young bohemians. Here, through her association with the Bloomsbury Group, Virginia Woolf was able to share her work and ideas and launched her career as a writer.
Despite her success, her mental health remained in a precarious state as she bore witness to and was subjected to many more personal and worldwide tragedies. In 1913 she attempted suicide. Since then, she would often slip into periods of mania where she suffered from hallucinations and depression.
Throughout her life she kept a diary. Rather than just a tool to keep track of the mundane, she aspired to form it as “the shadow of some kind of form which a diary might attain to”. She even compared journaling to music performance: “It strikes me that in this book I practise writing; do my scales.”
Her collection of diaries was published posthumously by her husband Leonard. The diary itself consists of 6 volumes and has been impactful for future generations to understand her artistic process and unguarded thoughts and interpretations of her work and the world around her.
Rome: tea. Tea in café. Ladies in bright coats and white hats.
Music. Look out and see people like movies . . . Ices.
Old man who haunts the Greco . . . Fierce large jowled old
ladies . . . talking about Monaco. Talleyrand. Some very
poor black wispy women. The effect of dowdiness produced
by wispy hair. Sunday café . . . Very cold. The Prime Minister's
letter offering to recommend me for the Companion of Honour. No.
In this movement from the Diary of Virginia Woolf, Argento places us into the languid and cynical perspective Woolf had on a visit to Rome on the brink of WWII in 1935. The piano introduction is capricious and melodramatic, harkening back to echoes of the grandeur of Italian opera while the singer’s melody remains somewhat stagnant remarking on the every day life of the people.
At the mention of “music”, the tone shifts and Argento calls back to an older reference: the tremelo of the Italian mandolin which is sustained with her next observations. To me, the choice of the mandolin tremelo imposes a romantic feeling of being in ~Rome~ onto Woolf’s mundane commentary. In the background, however, we hear an impending and forceful bassline which refuses to let us be distracted for too long, reminding us of the bleak reality that Woolf refuses to be distracted by.
This musical daydream officially ends when Virginia is confronted with “some very poor black wispy women” and the tone of her and Argento’s writing returns to being cold and sarcastic. The final “no” of Virginia’s rejection of the Prime Minister’s offer is punctuated neatly and dryly.
Thanks for "tuning" in! To hear more of the Dominick Argento's From the Diary of Virginia Wolf, join us this February for our upcoming concert cycle, Tenth Muse!
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