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Duration:
7 min.
Premiere
August 1958
Aspen Music festival, Aspen, CO David Del Tredici, piano
Dedication
"Dedicated to Bernhard Abramowitsch"
Program Note
Soliloquy is not only my first composition, but also my most dissonant. Written in the summer of 1958 at the Aspen Music Festival, it is a fantasy based on the minor second chords heard at the opening. The central portion becomes more excited and energetic, and the end, again more calm, is a variation of the beginning. Soliloquy is dedicated to my beloved piano teacher Bernhard Abramowitsch, but its composition was ironically prompted by my unhappiness in studying, that 1958 summer, under a far less congenial man. It is a fantasy based on the minor second chords heard at the opening. The central portion becomes more excited and virtuosic, and the end, again more calm, is a variation of the beginning.
- David Del Tredici
Press
"This work is coupled with his first work, Soliloquy (1958), which shows a young composer coming to grips with the predominant idiom of his age — the atonal, expressionstic, intense gesture."
- Taylor, American Record Guide
"The Soliloquy is genius bursting full forth: it is almost difficult to believe that a work of such complexity could be a first anything."
- Marilyn Tucker, San Francisco Chroniccle, 5 June 1978
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