Gian Carlo Menotti

Gian Carlo Menotti, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1944

Gian Carlo Menotti (July 7, 1911 – February 1, 2007) was an Italian-American composer and librettist. Although he often referred to himself as an American composer, he kept his Italian citizenship. He wrote the classic Christmas opera Amahl and the Night Visitors among about two dozen other operas intended to appeal to popular taste. He won the Pulitzer Prize for two of them, The Consul (1950) and The Saint of Bleecker Street (1955). He founded the noted Festival dei Due Mondi (Festival of the Two Worlds) in 1958 and its American counterpart, Spoleto Festival USA, in 1977. In 1986 he commenced a Melbourne Spoleto Festival in Australia, but he withdrew after three years.

Life and career

Born in Cadegliano-Viconago, Italy, near Lake Maggiore and the Swiss border, Menotti was the sixth of eight children of Alfonso and Ines Menotti, his father being a coffee merchant. Menotti began writing songs when he was seven years old, and at eleven wrote both the libretto and music for his first opera, The Death of Pierrot. He began his formal musical training at Milan's Verdi Conservatory in 1923.

After the death of her husband, Ines Menotti went to Colombia in a futile attempt to salvage the family's coffee business. She took Gian Carlo with her, and in 1928 she enrolled him at Philadelphia's Curtis Institute of Music, but she returned to Italy. Armed with a letter of introduction from Arturo Toscanini's wife, he studied composition at Curtis under Rosario Scalero. Fellow students at Curtis included Leonard Bernstein and Samuel Barber. The latter became Menotti's partner in life and in work, with Menotti crafting the libretto for Barber's most famous opera, Vanessa, which premiered in 1958, at the Metropolitan Opera. As a student, Menotti spent much of his time with the Samuel Barber family in West Chester, Pennsylvania. After graduation, the two men bought a house together in Mount Kisco, New York which they shared for over forty years and named "Capricorn". It was at Curtis that Menotti wrote his first mature opera, Amelia al Ballo (Amelia Goes to the Ball), to his own Italian text. The Island God (which he suppressed, though its libretto was printed by the Metropolitan Opera and can be found in many libraries) and The Last Savage were the only other operas he wrote in Italian, the rest being in English. Like Wagner, he wrote the libretti of all his operas. His most successful works were composed in the 1940s and 1950s. Menotti also taught at the Curtis Institute of Music.

He founded the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy in 1958, and the its companion festival in Charleston, South Carolina in 1977. For three weeks each summer, Spoleto is visited by nearly a half-million people. These festivals were intended to bring opera to a popular audience and helped launch the careers of such artists as singer Shirley Verrett and choreographers Paul Taylor and Twyla Tharp. He left Spoleto USA in 1993 to take the helm of the Rome Opera. In 1986 he also extended the concept to a Spoleto Festival in Melbourne, Australia. Menotti was the artistic director 1986-88, but after three festivals there he decided to withdraw, and took the naming rights with him. While he was in Melbourne, however, he put the finishing touches to his opera Goya. The Melbourne Spoleto Festival has now become the Melbourne International Arts Festival.

In 1974, Menotti adopted Francis "Chip" Phelan, an American actor and figure skater he had known since the early 1960s. In the same year, Menotti, persuaded by the good acoustics of the main room, bought Yester House, in the village of Gifford, East Lothian, in Scotland, the ancestral home of the marquesses of Tweeddale. While there, he jokingly referred to himself as "Mr McNotti".

In 1984 Menotti was awarded the Kennedy Center Honor for achievement in the arts, and in 1991 he was chosen Musical America's "Musician of the Year". In addition to composing operas to his own texts, on his own chosen subject matter, Menotti directed most productions of his work.

Menotti died on February 1, 2007 at the age of 95 in a hospital in Monte Carlo, Monaco, where he had a home.

In June and July 2007 the Festival of Two Worlds, which Menotti founded and oversaw until his death, dedicated the 50th Anniversary of the Festival to his memory, organised by his beloved son Francis. Menotti works performed during the festival included Maria Golovin, Landscapes and Remembrances, Missa O Pulchritudo, and The Unicorn, the Gorgon, and the Manticore.

Compositions

Menotti wrote the libretti for two of Samuel Barber's operas, Vanessa and A Hand of Bridge, as well as revising the libretto for Antony and Cleopatra. Amelia al Ballo is the only one of Menotti's operas still to be published in its original or perhaps "complimentary" Italian libretto (alongside the English)(see Ricordi editions 1937, 1976 and recent): it is an adept example of Italianate style (with a nod to but not an imitation of Puccini and Mascagni) and it is unjustly neglected. It was, however, at the time so successful that NBC commissioned an opera specifically for the new medium of radio, The Old Maid and the Thief, which was the first such work ever written for, and performed on the radio. Following this, he wrote a ballet, Sebastian (1944), and a piano concerto (1945) before returning to opera with The Medium and The Telephone, or L'Amour à trois.

His first full-length opera, The Consul, was premiered in 1950. It won both the Pulitzer Prize for Music and the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Musical Play of the Year (the latter in 1954). He intended to give a role to a then-unknown Maria Callas, but the producer would not have it. In 1951, Menotti wrote his beloved Christmas opera Amahl and the Night Visitors for NBC. It was the first opera ever written for television in America, and first aired on Christmas Eve, 1951. It was such a success that it became an annual Christmas tradition. It remains Menotti's most popular work to this day. Menotti won a second Pulitzer Prize for his opera The Saint of Bleecker Street in 1955. With Goya Menotti reverted to a traditional Giovane Scuola Italian style - perhaps written 80 years too late it may well have established itself (for a while at least) in the repertoire in an earlier period. But in a modernist world Menotti's work was rejected.

Menotti also wrote several ballets and numerous choral works. Of these, the most notable is his cantata The Death of the Bishop of Brindisi, written in 1963. He also wrote a violin concerto, symphonies, and a stage play, The Leper. It was in the field of opera, however, that he made his most notable contributions to American cultural life.

Chronology

• Amelia al ballo (1937)
• The Old Maid and the Thief, radio opera (1939)
• The Island God (1942)
• Sebastian (1944)
• The Medium (1946)
• The Telephone, or L'Amour à trois (1947)
• The Consul (1950)
• Amahl and the Night Visitors, television opera (1951), with 12-year-old Chet Allen in the lead role
• The Saint of Bleecker Street (1954)
• The Unicorn, the Gorgon, and the Manticore (1956)
• Maria Golovin (1958)
• Labyrinth television opera (1963)
• The Last Savage (1963)
• Martin's Lie (1964)
• Help, Help, the Globolinks! (1968)
• The Most Important Man (1971)
• Tamu-Tamu (1973)
• The Egg (1976)
• The Hero (1976)
• The Trial of the Gypsy (1978)
• Chip and his Dog, on commission for the CCOC (1979)
• La loca (1979)
• Missa 'O Pulchritudo' (1979)
• A Bride from Pluto (1982)
• The Boy Who Grew Too Fast (1982)
• Goya (1986), with Plácido Domingo in the title role
• The Wedding (Giorno da Nozze) (1988)
• The Singing Child (1993)

(Source: usopera.com)

Books

Vocal scores of his compositions:

• Amahl and the Night Visitors: Vocal Score. G. Schirmer, Inc, 1986. ISBN 0-881-88965-2.
• The Telephone: Vocal Score. G. Schirmer, Inc, 1986. ISBN 0-793-55370-9.
• The Medium: Vocal Score. G. Schirmer, Inc, 1986. ISBN 0-793-51546-7.
• Mass for the Contemporary English Liturgy. G. Schirmer, Inc, 1990.

Scholarly works about the composer:

• Wlaschin, Ken. Gian Carlo Menotti on Screen: Opera, Dance and Choral Works on Film, Television and Video. McFarland & Company, 1999. Library Binding: ISBN 0-786-40608-9
• Gruen, John. Menotti: A Biography. Hardcover. Macmillan Pub Co, 1978. ISBN 0-025-46320-9.

See also

• Leonard Kastle - a student of Menotti

External links

• Art of the States: Giancarlo Menotti
• Three Conversations with Gian Carlo Menotti by Bruce Duffie (1981, 1993, 1995)