William Flanagan (composer)

Although little known today, as well as unsuccessful and undervalued in his time,[2] a number of his brief vocal compositions, including Horror Movie and The Upside-Down Man, have been recorded.

He is best known today as having been the long-time lover of playwright Edward Albee, with whom he wrote an opera after Bartleby, the Scrivener.

[3] In 1963, Albee wrote one act of The Ice Age, a libretto for Flanagan, but the opera was never completed.

[4] Flanagan committed suicide in 1969, at age 46, after which Copland eulogized him in a memorial concert given by Albee and Ned Rorem.

[2] At the concert, Albee "announced that he was planning to open a writers' colony in Montauk to be called the William Flanagan Memorial Creative Persons Center.

[1] His compositional technique and musical preferences were molded in the 1930s and 1940s; he did not make the fashionable transition to serialism.

[7] Flanagan himself considered his songwriting style to be "'not just prosodized [sic] declamation, but...a bona fide lyric utterance'".

[6] Flanagan "was passionately concerned with language and felt that American composers would never fully realize themselves until they came to grips with native inflection.