Composers Datebook™ is a daily two-minute program designed to inform, engage, and entertain listeners with timely information about composers of the past and present. Each program notes significant or intriguing musical events involving composers of the past and present, with appropriate and accessible music related to each.
Argento in Italy
On today’s date in 1966, a symphonic work by the American composer Dominick Argento received its premiere performance by the Minneapolis Civic Orchestra at the St. Paul Campus Student Center of the University of Minnesota. The work was entitled “Variations for Orchestra (The Mask of Night)” for orchestra and soprano soloist. For the premiere performances, the vocal soloist was Argento’s wife, the soprano Carolyn Bailey. The music was composed in Florence, Italy. “I vividly remember the circumstances that inspired it,” wrote Argento. “Our seventh-floor apartment in the Piazza Pitti overlooked the Boboli Gardens and behind it, out of sight, was a military barracks. Every night at 10 o’clock a bugle solemnly intoned the Italian equivalent of taps. The sound seemed to be the voice of the garden itself—moonlit, deserted, cypress-scented, and mysterious ... The trumpet theme is a 12-tone row whose first six notes, I later realized, form the opening phrase sung by the Queen of the Night in Mozart’s The Magic Flute, a role my wife had often performed.” “Consequently,” Argento concludes, “these Variations are much indebted to my favorite city, my favorite writer, my favorite composer, and my favorite soprano.”