''From the Diary of Virginia Woolf'' is an eight-part
song cycle
A song cycle (german: Liederkreis or Liederzyklus) is a group, or cycle (music), cycle, of individually complete Art song, songs designed to be performed in a sequence as a unit.Susan Youens, ''Grove online''
The songs are either for solo voice ...
written by
Dominick Argento
Dominick Argento (October 27, 1927 – February 20, 2019) was an American composer known for his lyric operatic and choral music. Among his best known pieces are the operas '' Postcard from Morocco'', '' Miss Havisham's Fire'', ''The Masque of An ...
in 1974 for the English
mezzo-soprano Janet Baker
Dame Janet Abbott Baker (born 21 August 1933) is an English mezzo-soprano best known as an opera, concert, and lieder singer.Blyth, Alan, "Baker, Dame Janet (Abbott)" in Sadie, Stanley, ed.; John Tyrell; exec. ed. (2001). ''New Grove Dictionary ...
.
The work won the
Pulitzer Prize for Music
The Pulitzer Prize for Music is one of seven Pulitzer Prizes awarded annually in Letters, Drama, and Music. It was first given in 1943. Joseph Pulitzer arranged for a music scholarship to be awarded each year, and this was eventually converted ...
in 1975.
The text of the songs comes from ''A Writer's Diary: Being Extracts from the Diary of Virginia Woolf'', which was published in 1954.
(The five-volume diaries edited by Anne Olivier Bell were not published until 1979.
)
The choice of a prose, rather than poetic, source for a text is a common theme for Argento, who did the same thing in his cycles ''Letters from Composers'', ''The Andrée Expedition'', and ''Casa Guidi''. In each case, he captures the cadence and flow of these more free-form writings without sacrificing musical structure or melodic interest. The composer's original intention was to use excerpts from Woolf's novel ''The Waves'' as the basis for his cycle. But in reading her newly published diaries he discovered a source much richer in musical and expressive possibilities. The highly confessional diary texts illuminate Woolf's inner world in a more immediate way than do her literary works.
Movements
# The Diary
# Anxiety
# Fancy
# Hardy's Funeral
# Rome
# War
# Parents
# Last Entry
Assertion
Assertion
Recordings
From the Diary of Virginia WoolfArgento: From the Diary of Virginia Woolf / Benson: Songs for the End of the WorldD. Argento: From the Diary of Virginia Woolf
Score available from
Dominick Argento - From The Diary of Virginia Woolf (Medium Voice & Piano)
References
{{Authority control
Compositions by Dominick Argento
1974 compositions
Cultural depictions of Virginia Woolf
Pulitzer Prize for Music-winning works
Classical song cycles in English
Works based on diaries