Gian Carlo Menotti

Italian opera composer

• Born: July 7, 1911
• Birthplace: Cadegliano, Italy
• Died: February 1, 2007
• Place of death: Monaco

Menotti is known primarily for his dramatic operas, in which his music supports and advances the story told by his libretti to create theatrical spectacles. He also was a composer of ballets, concerti, and orchestral music.

Early Life

Gian Carlo Menotti (zhyahn KAHR-loh meh-NAW-tee) was born in Cadegliano, Italy, the sixth of eight children, to wealthy parents who were able by their financial and cultural backgrounds to nurse his immense musical interests. At the early age of four, Menotti began studying piano, and by the age of six, he had progressed to the point of composing his own melodies and simple accompaniments. On his ninth birthday, Menotti was given a puppet theater by his parents. This was a source of great fun and learning for Menotti, as he not only wrote and directed his own plays but also composed his own music for the productions. His first full-length opera was written in 1922, when he was eleven years old.

In 1923, the Menotti family moved to Milan, where Gian Carlo was enrolled in academic school, in which he displayed very little interest. At this same time, however, he also began studying at the Milan Conservatory of Music, where he was a regular student from 1923 to 1928. During this time, he composed a second full-length opera, The Death of Pierrot, the last act of which sees all the characters kill themselves. While studying at the conservatory, Menotti was also in demand as a pianist. Handsome, intelligent, and musically gifted, he was proudly exhibited in the most fashionable Milanese salons and was so spoiled that he refused to practice as he should have.

His mother, an accomplished musician herself, was wise enough to realize that the musical growth of her son was somewhat stunted in Milan. Compelled to travel to South America to untangle some of her husband’s interests following his death, she took her son with her in hopes of stopping off in were chosen on the return trip. Menotti was seventeen at the time and enjoyed visiting the different cultures of the Western world. On the return trip to Italy, they did stop in New York to visit an old friend of the family, Tullio Serafin, then conductor at the Metropolitan Opera House. Serafin introduced the Menottis to Rosario Scalero, an eminent composition teacher at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where Leonard Bernstein and Samuel Barber (who became a lifelong friend of Menotti) were also studying. To Scalero, Menotti seemed to be only an undisciplined boy, in spite of his talents, but after Menotti made a solemn promise, Scalero consented to teach him the fine points of composition. Menotti’s mother returned to Italy, leaving the young man in a strange new country, where he not only had to work hard and practice but also had to learn a new language English. He studied English by viewing motion pictures in theaters four times a week. He often stayed in Pennsylvania with the Barber family, who treated him as a son and were said to have a calming influence on his volatile nature.

Life’s Work

By the time Menotti reached the age of twenty-two, he was able to graduate from writing contrapuntal class exercises and began working on his first mature opera, Amelia Goes to the Ball . This one-act comic opera was produced in Philadelphia and New York by students and faculty of the Curtis Institute and was conducted by Fritz Reiner in 1937. Menotti’s operas are important as theatrical spectacles. Their greatest significance does not lie in the musical score, as it does with most operas. His music is sometimes more functional than inspired. Menotti drew from every available style and idiom to cater to his dramatic needs: from the popular to the esoteric, from the lyrical to the dissonant, from the romantic to the realistic. For the operas of Menotti, music was never an end but a means, and the end was realized in projection of effective theater.

Because of the necessary flow of the music to provide the listener with something substantial, portions of Menotti’s operas are seldom heard in the concert setting. The music loses its appeal when not heard in sequence of the story. Within the theater, however, his music carries tremendous impact and serves to tie the production together, provide a continual flow, and enhance the other artistic qualities of the productions.

Menotti wrote his first libretto in Italian, but henceforth he wrote all his opera libretti in English. The musical format for Amelia Goes to the Ball is in traditional style, with solo arias, duets, trios, and recitatives. The style is happy and tuneful, although at times spiced with a touch of discord or polytonality. The impressive nature of this work led to a commission by the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) to write an opera exclusively for radio production. On April 27, 1939, NBC introduced the work The Old Maid and the Thief, also written in a comic vein.

Meanwhile, in 1938 Menotti received word that his opera Amelia Goes to the Ball had been accepted by the Metropolitan Opera Company for its 1938 season. It was played seven times during that and the following season. Several years later, in 1942, the Metropolitan Opera commissioned an opera by Menotti, entitled The Island God. This opera, unfortunately, was not well received by the public.

While teaching at the Curtis Institute from 1941 to 1945, Menotti became determined to compose a successful serious opera, as he had thus far only seen success with his comic operas. The Medium , first heard in New York City in May of 1946, proved to be the work that opened to public view Menotti’s far-reaching dramatic powers. Since the first performance of The Medium, it has become one of the most famous American operas. It has been given more than one thousand performances in the United States, London, Paris, and Italy, and has also been made into a stirring motion picture. The film studio Metro Goldwyn Mayer (MGM) commissioned him to produce film scripts; although none was ever used, one became the basis for his highly successful The Consul (1950), concerning difficulties getting a visa in a police state.

Between 1948 and 1958, Menotti continued to compose, write, produce, and direct operas, sometimes as commissioned works, sometimes at his own pleasure, but always as intelligent, quality productions. In 1958, Menotti founded the Festival of the Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy. (In 1977 he founded a companion event, Spoleto Festival USA, in Charleston, South Carolina.) As founder and president, he was responsible for the presentation of several provocative contemporary operas.

On Christmas Eve, 1951, the production of Amahl and the Night Visitors was seen for the first time. This very popular work of Menotti is unique in that it is the first opera produced expressly for television transmission. The broadcast was repeated the following Easter and Christmas by NBC and has since been staged by many opera companies, including the New York City Opera.

Like Richard Wagner, Menotti was a one-man theater. He not only wrote his own text and music but also was his own stage director and casting director and had a general command of every other aspect of the production, much as he did at age nine with his puppet theater, only on a much grander scale. Menotti seemed to have an extraordinary sixth sense for finding small details that enhanced good drama. His ability to see clearly all details of the production even before rehearsals began, combined with his sense for what he desired to see in his opera in spite of popular opinion, led him often to select many comparatively inexperienced and unknown singers and performers for his works.

Menotti is known first and foremost as a composer of operas, of which he wrote twenty-five, and though Italian born and reared (retaining his Italian citizenship), he is considered to be America’s greatest composer of opera, because of his training in Philadelphia and his residency in New York City. He also wrote two concerti for piano, a concerto for violin, a triple concerto, some pieces for orchestra, some ballet music, Canti della Lontananza (1967, a seven-song cycle for soprano and piano), and a stage play. These works, however, did not see the publicity or the public acceptance of his operas. Additionally, he wrote several libretti for others, including for Vanessa (1958), Barber’s most celebrated opera.

His orchestration usually requires small groups of instruments in balance with small casts. His operas very seldom use the chorus so popular with other composers, and he relied on his solo singers to carry the work. This combination of relatively small performing forces makes his operas approachable by small opera companies and even school production groups. Especially popular with school-age students is Amahl and the Night Visitors because of its familiar message of Christmas and because the lead character is a young boy.

Menotti used the standard orchestral instruments for the most part. Very seldom did he venture into the lures of uncommon instrumental techniques for the sake of effect. He preferred, instead, when special effects were called for, to create them on the stage rather than in the orchestra pit. Although his music is spiced with twentieth century composition techniques such as polytonality and discords, the audience generally feels at ease as the music begins near the tonal center and never strays very far from it. His melodic structure may not always be singable to the average listener, but it is always listenable and pleasant to the ear.

Amahl and the Night Visitors is probably Menotti’s most popular opera. The music ranges from tender to exciting as the story of the three wise men following the star of the Christ Child unfolds. During their travels, they come upon the poor home of Amahl, a crippled beggar boy, and his mother. When Amahl learns of the wise men’s purpose, he gives his set of small crutches to the Magi as a present to the Holy Child. As Amahl goes forth to present his gift to the kings, he discovers that a miracle has taken place and that he is able to walk. This work thrives on beautifully flowing arias and angelic choruses. The emotion of the opera can be felt only when the entire production is presented. Therefore, it does not break down into concert sections well. Although Amahl and the Night Visitors was written for and introduced by the television screen, it has also been presented with immense success on stage.

Menotti’s operas, in addition to being successful and popular, brought him many awards. The Consul, which ran on Broadway for 269 performances, earned him a Pulitzer Prize for Music and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Musical Play of the Year. The Saint of Bleecker Street brought him a second Pulitzer Prize in 1955. However, Amahl and the NightVisitors remained his most popular piece, performed more than six hundred times between the time it debuted in 1951 and was filmed in 1996. In 1984 he received the Kennedy Center Honor for lifetime achievement in the arts and was named Musician of the Year by Musical America in 1991.

For thirty years Menotti lived in a house, called Capricorn, in Westchester County, New York, that he bought with Barber. In 1974 he bought a sixteenth century manor, Yester House, in Scotland, where he lived with his adopted son, Francis Phelan. He later acquired a second home in Monte Carlo, Monaco.

In 1993 he resigned as president of the Spoleto Festival USA and became director of the Rome Opera. At the Italian Spoleto festival in 1999 he codirected Sergei Prokofiev’s War and Peace, appearing as an extra in one scene. Works of his late career include Goya (1986, written for Placido Domingo), The Singing Child (1993), Gloria (1995, part of a mass), Jacob’s Prayer (1997, a vocal work), and Errand into the Maze (2005, ballet music). Menotti died in Monte Carlo’s Princess Grace Hospital on February 1, 2007. He was ninety-five years old.

Significance

Menotti’s eclecticism carried him from a Giacomo Puccini-like lyricism to the most advanced composition idioms. He could be romantic or dissonant, lyrical or mystic; however, he never seemed to sacrifice unity of concept or coherence of viewpoint. Menotti was above all else a man of the theater. He wrote his own libretti and music and commanded full control of the production of his operas. His operas are not only a vehicle for musical expression but also a vibrant and pulsating stage experience. Perhaps for this reason Menotti commanded a larger and more varied international audience than any other composer in the twentieth century.

A self-avowed musical conservative, Menotti seldom received his due from critics, who, more interested in avant-garde works, thought Menotti’s works overly sentimental and light. As his friend Paul Wittke wrote, however, the composer applied his febrile imagination to the prosaic world around him: “In this respect, Menotti, the realistic idealist in his work and life, is an exemplar of the problems we all face day after day.”

Bibliography

Austin, William W. Music in the Twentieth Century: From Debussy Through Stravinsky. New York: W. W. Norton, 1966. This book discusses the student-teacher relationships of twentieth century composers such as Menotti. It also discusses Menotti’s works in relationship to music of other composers.

Barnes, Jennifer. Television Opera: The Fall of Opera Commissioned for Television. Woodbridge, England: Boydell Press, 2003. Barnes discusses Menotti’s work at length for his innovations and successes, before a decline began in the relationship between television and commissioned operas.

Drummond, Andrew H. American Opera Librettos. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1973. Drummond lists all Menotti’s operas to date and quotes the poetic text of each. This book allows the reader the opportunity to see Menotti’s creative literary work.

Hixon, Donald L. Gian Carlo Menotti: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000. Hixon provides a short biographical essay and two sections of annotated bibliography about general references to Menotti music and specific performances. There are also a chronological and generic lists of his works. An invaluable resource for scholars and students.

Salzman, Eric. Twentieth Century Music: An Introduction. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967. Salzman compares Menotti’s theater talent to that of Puccini, describing how it goes beyond music and enters the areas of drama, stage usage, and function of characters among other things.

Wlaschin, Ken. Encyclopedia of American Opera. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2007. An excellent source for basic biographical information of Menotti and descriptions of his works, or for any other topic in American opera.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Gian Carlo Menotti on Screen: Opera, Dance, and Choral Works on Film, Television, and Video. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1999. Chapters concentrate on single operas by Menotti, offering a history, description of the screen adaptation, and listings of screen and audio versions. Accompanied by an annotated bibliography.