Alan Curtis

Alan Curtis earned acclaim through both his energetic stage appearances and his scholarly pursuits in reviving authentic practices for early opera. As a musicologist who also worked as a conductor and harpsichordist, he prepared editions of several significant scores that balanced historical fidelity, practical execution, and dramatic viability on stage. Many of his most admired recordings emerged during the 1990s and the opening decades of the new millennium.

Born November 17, 1934, in Mason, Michigan, Curtis completed a bachelor’s degree at Michigan State University in 1955. His graduate work at the University of Illinois was paused, after he finished the master’s requirements, for two years of study with Gustav Leonhardt in Amsterdam. After this period of guidance from the renowned harpsichordist, organist, and conductor, Curtis returned to Illinois and received his doctorate in 1963. By then he had already issued several scholarly publications that attracted notice within the expanding early-music movement. His dissertation on Sweelinck rapidly became the standard reference for that composer’s keyboard music and later supplied the core material for a fuller monograph released in 1969.

Curtis joined the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley in 1960 and advanced to full professor by 1970. During the intervening decade he began translating his research into live performance, establishing himself first as a capable harpsichordist and then as a conductor of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century opera. A recording of Monteverdi’s L’Incoronazione di Poppea was welcomed as a corrective to less historically informed versions and as proof that period practice could retain vivid dramatic force once freed from later Romantic conventions. While continuing his academic duties, Curtis appeared regularly as conductor and harpsichordist throughout the United States and Europe. In 1979 he founded the Amsterdam-based ensemble Il Complesso Barocco, with which he performed and recorded numerous operas. A 1980 debut at La Scala conducting Handel’s Ariodante led to additional major engagements in Italy. In 1984 he led Gluck’s Armida, still rarely heard at the time, in Bologna, and in 1989 he directed Cimarosa’s even less familiar Gli Orazi ed I Curiazi in Rome.

Recordings with Il Complesso Barocco continued well into the twenty-first century, including Handel’s Tolomeo (2008), Alcina (2009), and Giulio Cesare (2012). The group also collaborated on albums by leading soloists such as Joyce DiDonato’s Drama Queens and Max Emanuel Cencic’s Fantastic Cencic. Curtis died July 15, 2015, in Florence, Italy.