In Monday’s New York Times, Daniel J. Wakin reports that Dutch composer Louis Andriessen, 71, has won the University of Louisville’s Grawemeyer Award for La Commedia, an opera based on Dante’s Divine Comedy that was premiered in Amsterdam in 2008 and subsequently performed last spring at Carnegie Hall. Wakin notes that the fund supporting the award “has declined so much that the prize has been cut in half, its administrator said. Even so, now at $100,000, it is one of the field’s richest. … The Grawemeyer fund dropped to $17 million from about $29 million over six months in 2008 because of the stock market decline, said Allan Dittmar, the program’s executive director.” The Grawemeyer is awarded in the fields of music, religion, education, political science, and psychology.
Posted November 29, 2010
