The Washington
Post
March 12, 2020
Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Charles Wuorinen dies at 81
NEW YORK — Charles Wuorinen, winner of the 1970 Pulitzer
Prize in Music and composer of the operas “Brokeback Mountain” and “Haroun and
the Sea of Stories,” died from injuries sustained in a fall last September. He
was 81.
Wuorinen, who composed more than 270 works, died Wednesday
at New York-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center, spokeswoman Aleba
Gartner said Thursday.
“We have a world in which the instant response of the
untutored becomes the sole criterion for judgment,’’ he told The New York Times
in 1988, ahead of his 50th birthday. “A great work like a Beethoven symphony
becomes like a blob of toothpaste. There is the bored orchestra. There are the
indifferent audiences. They wait it through. They applaud. They leave.”
Just two years ago, he decried the awarding of
that year’s Pulitzer Prize in Music to hip-hop artist Kendrick Lamar, telling
the Times that signaled “the final disappearance of any societal interest in
high culture.”
Born in New York on June 9,
1938, Wuorinen’s father, John, was chairman of Columbia University’s
history department. Wuorinen received a bachelor’s degree from Columbia in 1961 and a
master’s in music two years later.
He won the New York Philharmonic’s Young Composers’ Award
when he was 16 and premiered a choral work “O Filii et Filiae (Sons and
Daughters)” at Town Hall in 1954.
Wuorinen was 32 when he won the Pulitzer for “Time’s
Encomium,” a four-channel work for synthesized sound that became the first
electronic composition to earn the honor.
His work was cerebral. “Haroun,” based on a children’s novel
by Salman Rushdie and with a libretto by James Fenton, premiered at the New
York City Opera in 2004. It opened with references to Boccaccio, Proust,
Tolstoy and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Actions that befuddle were called “P2C2E” —
“a Process Too Complicated to Explain.” The chorus sang out: “This is
minimalism,” prompting the audience to a laugh.
“Brokeback,” based on a short story by Annie Proulx about
two cowboys in love, was first adapted into a movie and then an opera. It was
commissioned by New York City Opera but moved to Madrid’s Teatro Real and premiered in 2014
after City Opera filed for bankruptcy.
“It is very beautiful, as the film shows,” Wuorinen told The
Associated Press, “but it is definitely not sentimental. It is not a romantic
landscape. It’s a deadly one — it’s dangerous.”
“Brokeback” finally reached the reconstituted New York City
Opera for its American premiere in 2018.
Longtime Metropolitan Opera music director James Levine was
among Wuorinen’s advocates and conducted the 2008 premiere of “Time Regained,”
a fantasy for piano and orchestra. Levine commissioned five works by Wuorinen,
including his Fourth Piano Concerto for the Boston Symphony Orchestra and
pianist Peter Serkin for its premiere in 2003.
Wuorinen wrote six compositions for the New York City
Ballet. His last completed work was his Second Percussion Symphony, debuted by Miami’s New World Symphony
last September.
He is survived by his husband of 32 years, Howard Stokar.
WUORINEN, Charles
(Charles Peter Wuorinen)
Born: 6/9/1938, New York City, New
York, U.S.A.
Died: 3/11/2020, New York City, New
York U.S.A.
Charles Wuorinen’s
western – composer:
Brokeback
Mountain - 2014
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