Discipline: Music Composition

Lee Hoiby

Discipline: Music Composition
Region: Long Eddy, NY
MacDowell Fellowships: 1952, 1954, 1957, 1958, 1959
Lee Hoiby (1926-2011) was an American composer and classical pianist. Best known as a composer of operas and songs, he was a disciple of composer Gian Carlo Menotti. Like Menotti, his works championed lyricism at a time when such compositions were deemed old fashioned. His most well-known work is his setting of Tennessee Williams's Summer and Smoke with a libretto by Lanford Wilson. It premiered at the St Paul Opera in 1971. Hoiby's first opera, The Scarf, a chamber opera in one act, which was produced by Menotti and premiered in 1957, was recognized by TIME and the Italian press as the hit of the first Spoleto Festival. His next opera, Natalia Petrovna (New York City Opera, 1964), now known in its revised version as A Month in the Country, based on a play by Ivan Turgenev, was also praised by critics. Among Hoiby's other operatic works are Something New for the Zoo (1979), the musical monologue The Italian Lesson (1981, text by Ruth Draper) which was produced off-Broadway in 1989 with Jean Stapleton, The Tempest (1986), and a one-act chamber opera, This Is the Rill Speaking (1992), with text by Lanford Wilson. He contributed the song, "The Darkling Thrush," with text by Thomas Hardy, to a 2006 multimedia opera, Darkling. Elements of this song were used as source material for the opera's remaining solo and ensemble music, written by composer Stefan Weisman. Hoiby's last opera was a setting of Romeo and Juliet (2004).