American composer Lee Hoiby is beloved by performers as diverse as Leontyne Price and Jean Stapleton, for his numerous settings of texts from Emily Dickinson to Julia Child. Mr. Hoiby was introduced to opera by his teacher at the Curtis Institute of Music, Gian Carlo Menotti, who involved him closely in the famed Broadway productions of The Consul and The Saint of Bleecker Street in the early 1950s. In 1957 Hoiby's one-act opera, The Scarf, was cited by Time Magazine and the Italian press as the hit of the first Spoleto (Italy) Festival. His next opera, Natalia Petrovna (New York City Opera, 1964; revised version, A Month in the Country , 1980) was praised by the distinguished Washington critic Paul Hume, who wrote that the closing octet was "of overwhelming beauty, a supreme moment in opera" comparable to the Meistersinger quintet and the Rosenkavalier trio. Harold Schonberg of the New York Times wrote that it was "truer by far" than the quintet in Barber's Vanessa. Still, the mid-twentieth century intellectual prejudice against tonality and lyricism, combined with Hoiby's own professional modesty (carried almost to the point of reclusiveness), worked against widespread recognition of his importance.

Hoiby's 1971 setting of Tennessee Williams's Summer and Smoke (with libretto by Lanford Wilson) was declared "the finest American opera to date" by Harriet Johnson of the New York Post; and in 1981 Peter Davis wrote in New York Magazine that "Perhaps ten years ago, music of this sort, unabashedly drenched in ardent melody, was considered something of an embarrassment. Today such an attitude seems childish and irrelevant." Hoiby continued to pursue lyric opportunities with his 1986 setting of Shakespeare's The Tempest, of which Opera Magazine (London) wrote that it was "redolent of Das Rheingold and Richard Srauss, but even so was melodically, harmonically, and musically, pure Hoiby," while the Christian Science Monitor found it "superbly singable and downright beautiful".

The Tempest had its third production at the Dallas Opera in 1996. Other operatic works by Mr. Hoiby include the one act comedy Something New for the Zoo (1979), The Italian Lesson (1981, text by Ruth Draper) and This Is the Rill Speaking (1992, text by Lanford Wilson). He recently created a music-theater piece on texts of Virginia Woolf called What Is the Light? for Claire Bloom and the 92nd Street Y.

Mr. Hoiby has also made significant contributions to the piano repertory, including two piano concertos, and his choral music is widely performed in churches throughout the USA. He has written chamber music in numerous combinations and continues actively to compose and garden in upstate New York.

Lee Hoiby was born in Wisconsin in 1926. He studied composition at the Curtis Institute. His works have been recognized by awards and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the Ford Foundation, the Fulbright Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts.

In 1989 his work was the subject of a retrospective concert at the Kennedy Center on the American Composer Series, and a two week festival of his work was presented by the music department of the University of California at Long Beach. Mr Hoiby is also a noted pianist who appears in recitals featuring the standard repertory as well as his own works. He has appeared as soloist in his own concertos, and frequently as an accompanist to singers and instrumentalists who perform his music. His principal works include the operas The Scarf (1958), A Month in the Country (1964), Summer and Smoke (1971) and The Tempest (1986). He is also the composer of nearly 100 songs, as well as music for orchestra, solo instruments, chorus and the theater. He lives in upstate New York.

See also the New Groves Dictionary of Music and Musicians online, Lee Hoiby

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