Menotti, Gian Carlo

Menotti, Gian Carlo, remarkable Italian composer; b. Cadegliano, July 7, 1911. He was the 6^th of 10 children. He learned the rudiments of music from his mother, and began to compose as a child, making his first attempt at an opera, entitled The Death of Pierrot, at the age of 10. After training at the Milan Cons. (1924–27), he studied with Scalerò at the Curtis Inst. of Music in Philadelphia (1927–33). Although Menotti associated himself with the cause of American music, and spent much of his time in the U.S., he retained his Italian citizenship. As a composer, he is unique on the American scene, being the first to create American opera possessing such an appeal to audiences as to become established in the permanent repertoire. Inheriting the natural Italian gift for operatic drama and an expressive singing line, he adapted these qualities to the peculiar requirements of the American stage and to the changing fashions of the period; his serious operas have a strong dramatic content in the realistic style stemming from the Italian verismo. He wrote his own librettos, marked by an extraordinary flair for drama and for the communicative power of the English language; with this is combined a fine, though subdued, sense of musical humor. Menotti made no pretensions at extreme modernism, and did not fear to approximate the successful formulas developed by Verdi and Puccini; the influence of Mussorgsky’s realistic prosody is also in evidence, particularly in recitative. When dramatic tension required a greater impact, Menotti resorted to atonal and polytonal writing, leading to climaxes accompanied by massive dissonances. His first successful stage work was Amelia Goes to the Ball, an opera buffa in 1 act (originally to an Italian libretto by the composer, as Amelia al ballo), staged at the Academy of Music, Philadelphia, on April 1, 1937. This was followed by another comic opera, The Old Maid and the Thief, commissioned by NBC, first performed on the radio, April 22, 1939, and on the stage, by the Philadelphia Opera Co., on Feb. 11, 1941. Menotti’s next operatic work was The Island God, produced by the Metropolitan Opera, N.Y., on Feb. 20, 1942, with indifferent success; but with the production of The Medium (N.Y., May 8, 1946), Menotti established himself as one of the most successful composer-librettists of modern opera. The imaginative libretto, dealing with a fraudulent spiritualist who falls victim to her own practices when she imagines that ghostly voices are real, suited Menotti’s musical talent to perfection; the opera had a long and successful run in N.Y., an unprecedented occurrence in the history of the American lyric theater. A short humorous opera, The Telephone, was first produced by the N.Y. Ballet Soc, Feb. 18, 1947, on the same bill with The Medium; these 2 contrasting works were subsequently staged all over the U.S. and in Europe, often on the same evening. Menotti then produced The Consul (Philadelphia, March 1, 1950), his finest tragic work, describing the plight of political fugitives vainly trying to escape from an unnamed country but failing to obtain the necessary visa from the consul of an anonymous power; very ingeniously, the author does not include the title character in the cast, since the consul never appears on the stage but remains a shadowy presence. The Consul exceeded Menotti’s previous operas in popular success; it had a long run in N.Y., and received the Pulitzer Prize in Music. On Christmas Eve, 1951, NBC presented Menotti’s television opera Amahl and the Night Visitors, a Christmas story of undeniable poetry and appeal; it became an annual television production every Christmas in subsequent years. His next opera was The Saint of Bleecker Street, set in a N.Y. locale (N.Y, Dec. 27, 1954); it won the Drama Critics’ Circle Award for the best musical play of 1954, and the Pulitzer Prize in Music for 1955. A madrigal ballet, The Unicorn, the Gorgon and the Manti-core, commissioned by the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation, was first presented at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., Oct. 21, 1956. His opera Maria Golovin, written expressly for the International Exposition in Brussels, was staged there on Aug. 20, 1958. In 1958 he organized the Festival of 2 Worlds in Spoleto, Italy, staging old and new works; in 1977 he inaugurated an American counterpart of the festival in Charleston, S.C. In many of the festival productions Menotti acted also as stage director. In the meantime, he continued to compose; he produced in quick succession Labyrinth, a television opera to his own libretto (N.Y, March 3, 1963); Death of the Bishop of Brindisi, dramatic cantata with the text by the composer (Cincinnati, May 18, 1963); Le Dernier Sauvage, opera buffa, originally with an Italian libretto by Menotti, produced at the Opéra-Comique in Paris in a French tr. (Oct. 21, 1963; produced in Eng. at the Metropolitan Opera, N.Y, Jan. 23, 1964); Martin’s Lie, chamber opera to Menotti’s text (Bath, England, June 3, 1964); Help, Help, the Globolinksl, “an opera in 1 act for children and those who like children” to words by Menotti, with electronic effects (Hamburg, Dec. 19, 1968); The Most Important Man, opera to his own libretto (N.Y, March 12, 1971); The Hero, comic opera (Philadelphia, June 1, 1976); The Egg, a church opera to Menotti’s own libretto (Washington Cathedral, June 17, 1976); The Trial of the Gypsy for Treble Voices and Piano (N.Y, May 24, 1978); Miracles for Boy’s Chorus (Fort Worth, April 22, 1979); La loca, opera to Menotti’s own libretto dealing with a mad daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella (San Diego, June 3, 1979); A Bride from Pluto, children’s opera (Washington, D.C., April 14, 1982); The Boy Who Grew Too Fast, opera for young people (Wilmington, Del., Sept. 24, 1982); The Wedding, opera (Seoul, Sept. 16, 1988); Singing Child, children’s opera (Charleston, S.C, May 31, 1993). Among Menotti’s non-operatic works are the ballets Sebastian (1944) and Errand into the Maze (N.Y, Feb. 2, 1947); 2 piano concertos: No. 1 (Boston, Nov. 2, 1945) and No. 2 (Miami, June 23, 1982); Apocalypse, symphonic poem (Pittsburgh, Oct. 19, 1951); Violin Concerto (Philadelphia, Dec. 5, 1952, Zimbalist soloist); Triplo Concerto a Tre, triple concerto (N.Y., Oct. 6, 1970); Landscapes and Remembrances, cantata to his own autobiographical words (Milwaukee, May 14, 1976); First Symphony, subtitled The Halcyon (Philadelphia, Aug. 4, 1976); Nocturne for Soprano, String Quartet, and Harp (N.Y., Oct. 24, 1982); Double Bass Concerto (N.Y. Phil, Oct. 20, 1983, James VanDemark, soloist, Zubin Mehta conducting); For the Death of Orpheus for Tenor, Chorus, and Orch. (Atlanta, Nov. 8, 1990). He also wrote a number of pièces d’occasion such as Trio for a House-Warming Party for Piano, Cello, and Flute (1936); Variations on a Theme by Schumann; Pastorale for Piano and Strings; Poemetti per Maria Rosa (piano pieces for children); etc. He is also the author of the librettos for Samuel Barber’s operas Vanessa (Metropolitan Opera, N.Y, Jan. 15, 1958) and A Hand of Bridge (1959); also wrote a play without music, The Leper (Tallahassee, April 22, 1970).

Menotti’s last years were plagued with disputes over his role as an artistic director. In 1991 a major dispute arose between the composer and the director of the Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, but ultimately Menotti retained control. However, in 1993 he announced that he was taking the festival away from Charleston, but the city’s mayor intervened and Menotti lost control of his festival. That same year he was named artistic director of the Rome Opera, but again conflicts over artistic policy between the composer and the superintendent led to Menotti’s dismissal in 1994.

Bibliography

J. Gruen,M.: A Biography (N.Y., 1978); J. Ardoin, The Stages of M. (Garden City, N.Y., 1985).

—Nicolas Slonimsky/Laura Kuhn/Dennis McIntire