On today’s date in 1966, the first purely symphonic work of the American composer Dominick Argento received its premiere performance by the Minneapolis Civic Orchestra at the St. Paul Campus Student Center of the University of Minnesota. A second performance took place the following day at Coffmann Memorial Union on the Minneapolis campus of the University. The work was entitled “Variations for Orchestra (The Mask of Night)” for orchestra and soprano soloist. For the premiere performances, the vocal soloist was Argento’s wife, the soprano Carolyn Bailey.

The music was composed in Florence, Italy.

“I vividly remember the circumstances that inspired it,” wrote Argento. “Our seventh-floor apartment in the Piazza Pitti overlooked the Boboli Gardens and behind it, out of sight, was a military barracks. Every night at 10 o’clock a bugle solemnly intoned the Italian equivalent of taps. The sound seemed to be the voice of the garden itself—moonlit, deserted, cypress-scented, and mysterious. References to night in Shakespeare’s plays served as points of departure for the variations... The trumpet theme is a 12-tone row whose first six notes, I later realized, form the opening phrase sung by the Queen of the Night in Mozart’s The Magic Flute, a role my wife had often performed. Consequently,” Argento concludes, “these Variations are much indebted to my favorite city, my favorite writer, my favorite composer, and my favorite soprano.”