[New-Poetry] RIP Gian Carlo Menotti (1911-2007)

[Halvard Johnson]

February 1, 2007

Gian Carlo Menotti, Opera Composer, Dies at 95

By BERNARD HOLLAND

Gian Carlo Menotti, who wrote his first opera before he was 11 and  
went on to become perhaps the most popular and prolific opera  
composer of his time, winning two Pulitzer Prizes, died today in  
Monaco. He was 95.

His death, at Princess Grace Hospital, was announced by his son,  
Francis.

Though critics often dismissed Mr. Menotti’s music as maudlin and  
unadventurous, many of them still celebrated his impressive lyric  
gifts, his deft touch with orchestral sound and his talent for making  
opera comprehensible and enjoyable for people who had previously  
shunned it. Of his critics, he once said, “They often spoil my  
breakfast but never my lunch.”

His contemporaries, too, were sometimes unkind. Igor Stravinsky  
dismissed Mr. Menotti’s musical language as “mid-Mascagni.” The  
composer Luigi Nono withdrew from a project rather than allow his  
music to appear on the same program as Mr. Menotti’s.

Yet well over 600 performances of Mr. Menotti’s made-for-television  
“Amahl and the Night Visitors” have been counted, and the piece is  
done often by amateur companies or in high school gymnasiums.

Mr. Menotti’s works, including “The Medium,” “The Consul,” “The  
Telephone” and “The Saint of Bleeker Street,” all showed that opera  
could sustain itself in a Broadway theater, something that Kurt Weill  
and George Gershwin managed to do only sporadically.

Mr. Menotti’s involvement with the musical theater was complete. He  
composed 25 operas, almost all of them in English. He wrote his own  
librettos and usually staged his works.

He also founded and directed for many years the Festival of Two  
Worlds, a long-running summer music festival that began in 1958 in  
Spoleto, Italy. In 1977, he helped establish an American arm of  
Spoleto in Charleston, S.C. Among other things, the festival gave  
American musicians and composers an important forum. He withdrew from  
the Charleston festival in 1993, after years of wrangling with its  
administrators and city officials.

Much of his professional life was spent in the United States, and he  
usually spoke of himself as an American composer, despite retaining  
his Italian citizenship and despite removing to an estate of baronial  
splendor near the Scottish border.

In a musical age in which controversy usually centered on the avant- 
garde, Mr. Menotti was controversial for his conservatism. Writing of  
his opera “The Last Savage” in 1964, he said:

“To say of a piece that it is harsh, dry, acid and unrelenting is to  
praise it. While to call it sweet and graceful is to damn it. For  
better or for worse, in ‘The Last Savage’ I have dared to do away  
completely with fashionable dissonance, and in a modest way, I have  
endeavored to rediscover the nobility of gracefulness and the  
pleasure of sweetness.”

“Atonal music,” he said elsewhere, “is essentially pessimistic. It is  
incapable of expressing joy or humor.” In interviews, the composer  
Pierre Boulez often served as whipping boy for Mr. Menotti’s musical  
dislikes.

Mr. Menotti’s operas continued the Italian lyric tradition epitomized  
by composers like Puccini, to whom he was often compared. Donal  
Henahan, of The New York Times, once wrote, “He has suffered from a  
fear almost unknown among contemporary composers, the fear of losing  
touch with his audience and with the conventions of the traditional  
stage.”

Gian Carlo Menotti was born on July 7, 1911, in Cadegliano, Italy, a  
small town on Lake Lugano in Lombardy. He was the sixth of eight  
children in a prosperous merchant family engaged in the coffee  
business. Mr. Menotti’s mother, Ines, provided piano, violin and  
cello lessons for her children, and there were evening musicales in  
the Menotti household that left a profound impression on Gian Carlo  
as a young child.

Mr. Menotti began writing songs when he was 5 years old, and by the  
age of 11 he had written his first opera, “The Death of Pierrot,”  
which was performed as a puppet show at home. His second opera, a  
version of Hans Christian Andersen’s “Little Mermaid,” was composed  
two years later.

In 1924, the family moved to Milan, where Gian Carlo attended the  
Verdi Conservatory of Music for three years and deepened his interest  
in opera, often going to La Scala. He read widely — fairy tales  
especially — and his growing taste for exoticism, the supernatural  
and the highly theatrical was to influence his later work.

At 17, When Gian Carlo accompanied his mother to Colombia in her  
final and futile effort to resurrect the family’s collapsing coffee  
business. On her way back to Italy, in 1928, she deposited her son at  
the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.

Armed with an introductory letter from Arturo Toscanini’s wife and a  
rudimentary command of English, Mr. Menotti began his studies with  
Rosario Scalero, Curtis’s eminent professor of composition. Mr.  
Scalero found the young man a talent greatly lacking in discipline  
and set him to a systematic regimen of traditional counterpoint and  
early-music studies.

At Curtis, Mr. Menotti began his partnership with the American  
composer Samuel Barber. They lived, traveled and worked together  
intermittently until Mr. Barber’s death in 1981.

Mr. Menotti’s first mature opera was begun on an extended sojourn in  
Austria with Barber after Mr. Menotti graduated from Curtis in 1933.  
It was called “Amelia al Ballo” and incorporated characters and  
situations that were to reappear in his work — in this case, a  
frivolous lady’s circumventions of a jealous husband. “Amelia” was  
first given in Philadelphia in 1937.

In its English version, “Amelia Goes to the Ball” was successful  
enough at the Metropolitan Opera in New York to win Mr. Menotti a  
commission for NBC radio. The work, “The Old Maid and the Thief,”  
also a one-act affair, dealt with a spinster’s conspiracy to snare  
her attractive young lodger. It was first broadcast in 1939 and later  
reworked for the stage.

Mr. Menotti’s first full-blown opera, “The Island God,” failed badly  
at the Met in 1942, but “The Medium,” written in 1946, ran for 211  
performances on Broadway the next year with another Menotti piece,  
“The Telephone.” “The Medium” was a compendium of the Menotti style —  
delicate orchestration, lyric writing and often a melodramatic  
theatricality.

By 1950, he had finished “The Consul,” a tale of political outcasts  
in Europe pitted against an unresponsive bureaucracy. “The Consul”  
ran on Broadway for 269 performances and won both the Drama Critics  
Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize.

Mr. Menotti’s 1951 television opera, “Amahl and the Night Visitors,”  
again written for NBC, was perhaps his most popular and successful  
stage work. “Amahl” was inspired by Hieronymous Bosch’s painting “The  
Adoration of the Magi” and tells of the healing of a crippled boy who  
offers his crutches as a gift to the Infant Jesus.

“The Saint of Bleeker Street,” first produced on Broadway for the  
1954-55 season, carried a theme that much preoccupied Mr. Menotti’s  
career: the tension between mysticism and faith on the one hand and  
the cynical “real” world on the other. It did not make money, but the  
critics liked it. “The Saint of Bleeker Street” earned Mr. Menotti  
his second Pulitzer.

He almost always wrote the words for his own operas, and in 1958 he  
served the same function for Barber. The opera was Barber’s  
“Vanessa,” for which Mr. Menotti provided both libretto and stage  
direction. Soon afterward he wrote librettos for two other operas:  
Barber’s “Hand of Bridge” and “Introductions and Goodbyes” by Lukas  
Foss.

His own operas kept pouring out — including “Labyrinth” (1963), “The  
Last Savage” (1963), “Martin’s Lie” (1964), “Help, Help, the  
Globolinks” (1968), “The Most Important Man” (1971), “The  
Hero” (1976), “The Egg” (1976) and “The Trial of the Gypsy (1978).

Mr. Menotti was also active composing ballets, cantatas, orchestral  
tone poems, instrumental concertos, songs and chamber music. And he  
wrote several plays. In one, “The Leper” (1970), he offered a plea  
for tolerance toward homosexuality.

Mr. Menotti lived for many years with Mr. Barber in a house known as  
Capricorn in Mt. Kisco, N.Y. The house was sold in 1973, and Mr.  
Menotti moved to Yester House, a 16th-century manor in the hills near  
Edinburgh, Scotland. The heir presumptive to his personal and musical  
estate is his son, Francis, who was an aspiring actor when Mr.  
Menotti met him in the early 1970s. He later adopted him.


"Time is what keeps us waiting."

Halvard Johnson
================
halvard at gmail.com
halvard at earthlink.net
http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard
http://entropyandme.blogspot.com
http://imageswithoutwords.blogspot.com
http://www.hamiltonstone.org




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