[Nov. 29, 2010] - La Commedia, a multimedia opera by Dutch composer Louis Andriessen that was inspired by Dante's Divine Comedy, has won the 2011 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition.
The Grawemeyer has become one of the most important compositional prizes in the world since it was first established in 1984, and comes with $100,000. Grawemeyers are also given yearly in the fields of education, religion, psychology, and "ideas improving world order."
Andriessen was born in Utrecht--"in a side street by a small canal in the medieval center," as he puts it--into a very musical family; both his father and brother were also composers, while his mother was a professional pianist.
A onetime student at the Royal Conservatory in the Hague (where he is now a professor), Andriessen studied in Milan and Berlin with Luciano Berio. Although his early efforts were in a serialist style, Andriessen's musical language soon incorporated a wide range, encompassing everything from Stravinsky to American jazz and boogie-woogie, styles to which his brother introduced him after a stay in the US. The young Andriessen was so enchanted that he started regularly visiting the US Embassy for their audio library holdings.
His more mature compositions frequently weave together seemingly disparate sources and instruments, including the electric guitar, within a bracing "classical" milieu.
Before the premiere of La Commedia in its entirety, portions of the piece were performed abroad; the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Los Angeles Master Chorale gave two such performances of different parts of the piece in 2006 and in 2007. The entire opera was debuted in 2008 at Amsterdam's Holland Festival, and in 2010 American performances were given both in Los Angeles and at Carnegie Hall, where he has also held the Richard and Barbara Debs Composer's Chair in 2009-10.
His other prizes include a Musical America Composer of the Year Award (2010), as well as the Matthijs Vermeulen Prijs, the 3M Music Award, and an Edison Award. He has also been honored by the UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers.
After La Commedia's Amsterdam premiere, London's Sunday Times called the opera "the distillation of a lifetime's creativity... There is nothing ethereal about this opera. Its questing vigour is of a materialist, Brechtian, Godardian kind. It relishes the mixture of media, musical quotations and parody, intellectual subtexts and ironic commentary while remaining spunkily itself — a brilliant, new-fangled circus."
The opera is dedicated to Andriessen's late wife, Jeannette, his partner of more than 50 years; she became seriously ill during the period in which Andriessen wrote La Commedia and passed away before the work's first performance.
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by Anastasia Tsioulcas
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