John Corigliano

A lifelong New Yorker, John Corigliano is of an age with such other New York composers as Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and Meredith Monk. Unlike them, however, he is no minimalist. Rather, he belongs to a particularly American tradition of Romanticism spiked with jazz rhythms and dissonance, a tradition maintained into the second half of the 20th century by Samuel Barber and Leonard Bernstein, and into the 21st century by himself. He was, in a word, “postmodern” before the term was invented.

Corigliano has maintained his robustly traditional principles while gradually widening his stylistic range. Color and drama are among the strengths displayed in his orchestral scores, which constitute roughly half his output. But he has also written many vocal works, including songs, choral pieces with orchestral accompaniment, and two operas. States of agitation—sometimes undercut by humor—are common in his music, but always settle into emphatic resolution or calm.

Early Years: Family, Education, and Creative Beginnings

Corigliano’s father was concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic, his mother a piano teacher. He studied with Otto Luening at Columbia College (1955–59) and then at the Manhattan School of Music with Vittorio Giannini and Paul Creston—both members of the American, jazz-age Romantic school.

Leaving aside a few pieces from his undergraduate years, he effectively made his start as a composer after graduating from the Manhattan School of Music. His first commission came from Tanglewood in 1962: What I Expected Was . . ., a setting of a Stephen Spender poem for chorus, brass, and percussion. Two years later, his Violin Sonata won a competition at Gian Carlo Menotti’s festival in Spoleto, Italy. His first orchestral performance followed in 1966, with the San Francisco Symphony’s premiere of his Elegy, and his first orchestral commission came in 1968: the Piano Concerto, written for the San Antonio Symphony. This was a large-scale, dramatic work, the emphatic statement of a now more mature composer in his late twenties. However, the concerto gained little attention, and Corigliano had to wait 40 years before it began to be performed with any frequency.

Corigliano: Sonata for Violin and Piano

Middle Period: From Orchestra to Opera

Lack of recognition for his first major orchestral piece likely contributed to the slowing of Corigliano’s output for several years. During this relatively slack period, however, he began to absorb the innovations of his avant-garde colleagues: new instrumental sounds, textures that are only loosely fixed, spatially separated instruments, and sonority as a first principle, alongside harmony and melody. He put these techniques into practice in his Oboe Concerto (1975) and, still more so, his Clarinet Concerto (1977), in which a conventional three-movement form is splintered into 17 smaller sections. This latter work, his first commission from the New York Philharmonic, gave him the opportunity to write for an orchestra he had known since childhood. It was an immediate success, and has taken its place in the international repertory.

Having proved his orchestral mastery, Corigliano was soon receiving more commissions: from Warner Bros. for the score of the sci-fi/horror movie Altered States (1980), from the Boston Pops (Promenade Overture, 1981), and from the flutist James Galway for a concerto (Pied Piper Fantasy, 1982). Invited to write a test piece for semifinalists at the 1985 Van Cliburn Competition, he produced Fantasy on an Ostinato—his one skeptical brush with minimalism, and also an example of his occasional working with given material (in this case, the scherzo of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony). The work has been recorded by notable pianists, including Emanuel Ax and Daniil Trifonov, and, in 1986, Corigliano made an orchestral version that has also been widely performed. In 1988, he completed his First Symphony, in which he gave expression to his rage at the losses caused by the AIDS epidemic, and to poignant memories of friends who had been among those losses. The work won him the 1991 Grawemeyer Prize for Music Composition.

That same year, his opera The Ghosts of Versailles received its premiere at the Metropolitan Opera. It was the first work commissioned by the company since Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra, which had opened the new Metropolitan Opera House in 1966. The opera is a ghost story in which the revenants include characters from Le nozze di Figaro singing music of the late 20th century, as they relive their old insecurities and encounter new ones. The plot involves their original creator Pierre Beaumarchais, the French Revolution, and dates with Marie Antoinette. Through and beyond the events on stage, the opera makes a stand for cultural continuity, and against the dangers of radical innovation. In reduced orchestrations—either made by Corigliano (1995) or sanctioned by him (2009)—it has been revived several times in the US and in Europe.

Recent Years: Further Achievements

Having spent a decade on The Ghosts of Versailles, Corigliano took a few years to concentrate on shorter pieces and small-scale works. His next major project came in 1997, when he composed a score for solo violin and strings for The Red Violin: a film showing scenes from the life of a Stradivari violin over three centuries. The score won him an Oscar and resulted in three concert works: a Chaconne for Violin and Orchestra (1997), a Suite for Solo Violin, Strings, Harp, and Percussion (1999), and a Violin Concerto (2003), subtitled “The Red Violin.” Corigliano wrote the concerto for the violinist Joshua Bell, who had played on the original film score; several other soloists have taken the work around North America and beyond, making it one of the composer’s most frequently performed compositions.

Keeping his focus on strings, Corigliano arranged his String Quartet of 1995 for string orchestra, and thus created his Symphony No. 2 of 2000. That same year he also produced Mr. Tambourine Man, in which lyrics by Bob Dylan are startlingly introduced to the world of art song. He then switched to wind instruments for his Symphony No. 3 (2005), subtitled “Circus Maximus,” which features three bands: one onstage, one offstage, and one marching. The result is cheerfully dramatic—the eight short movements mostly extraverted and punchy, with gentler episodes to provide contrast and purpose. Conjurer (2007), Corigliano’s concerto for percussionist and string orchestra, is another work of keen abstract theater. Moving through three solo cadenzas, which give rise to interplay with the orchestra, the soloist performs on wood, metal, and skin instruments in turn. There is a parallel here with the saxophone concerto Triathlon (2020), which presents the soloist in steadily lower registers—soprano saxophone in the first movement, alto in the second, and baritone in the third.

Triathlon is one of the relatively few major works Corigliano has produced since turning 70. Among the others is a second full-scale opera: The Lord of Cries, in which the characters of Bram Stoker’s Dracula find themselves recast in The Bacchae of Euripides. The premiere was given by the Santa Fe Opera in 2021.

Watching and Listening 

In Corigliano’s small output of chamber pieces, the String Quartet and Violin Sonata are his only essays in standard genres. Most of the other chamber works are choice miniatures, like his Soliloquy—an arrangement for clarinet and string quartet of the slow movement of his Clarinet Concerto, co-commissioned by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Another CMS commission was his Poem in October (1970): a setting of lines by one of his favorite poets, Dylan Thomas, for tenor, woodwinds, harpsichord, and string quartet.

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