Gian Carlo Menotti is one of the 20th century’s most commercially successful composers of opera. For nearly 60 years, Menotti was responsible for a string of award-winning new works, the majority of which were greeted with great public enthusiasm. Although he was mostly known for his operas, he also wrote ballets, cantatas, and orchestral works.
Born in Cadegliano, Italy, on July 7, 1911, Menotti was a child prodigy, composing songs with the help of his mother at the tender age of seven. His first opera, The Death of Pierrot, was composed only four years later. For this work he wrote both the words and music, a practice he followed, with only three exceptions, throughout his professional career. Upon completing a second opera, he was accepted as a student at the Verdi Conservatory in Milan at the age of 13. After his father died, his mother took him to the United States, where in 1928 he enrolled at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, studying composition with Rosario Scalero. There, he developed a close friendship with Samuel BARBER, another composition student.
After receiving his diploma in 1933, Menotti travelled to Vienna, where he began working on his one-act opera Amelia al hallo. It was premiered in New York in 1936 and enthusiastically received. The Metropolitan Opera agreed to produce it the following season, and the National Broadcasting Company asked him to compose another opera for radio, the first such commission ever given. The result was The Old Maid and the Thief (1939), one of Menotti’s most enduring works.
By this time Menotti had clearly established himself as a leading composer of popular 20th-century opera. Five operas followed in quick succession. The Medium, the story of a person caught between the world of reality and the world of the supernatural, had an astonishing two-year run on Broadway, with 211 performances during 1947 and 1948. A contrasting work, the comedy The Telephone, was a clever one-act piece which is frequently paired with The Medium in programming.
The Consul was Menotti’s first full-length opera. It was a realistic piece, dealing with a police state and the difficulty experienced by a citizen attempting to obtain a visa to leave. It premiered on March 15, 1950, and had a continuous run of performances in the same Broadway theatre for eight months. Awarded a Pulitzer Prize and Drama Critics Award for the best musical play of 1950, this work has been performed in over 20 countries, in 12 languages. Menotti won a second Pulitzer Prize for The Saint of Bleeker Street in 1954. In between these works was the charming, if somewhat sentimental Amahl and the Night Visitors, a piece commissioned by NBC-TV specifically for television broadcast in 1951.
In 1958, Menotti founded the Spoleto Festival of Two Worlds, a major summer festival devoted to the cultural collaboration between Europe and America in a programme involving all the arts. Towards the end of the century, he also established a reputation as an opera director. Meanwhile, Menotti continued to compose new works, including Jacob’s Prayer, which was premiered on March 8, 1997, as a part of the American Choral Directors Association national conference in San Diego, California.
While Menotti’s pieces enjoyed huge popular success, he did not receive the equivalent critical acclaim, and his works have been widely criticised for being too populist and old-fashioned. Nevertheless, he developed his own style and vocabulary, and in the process brought music, especially opera, to a wider audience than otherwise might have been possible.
Michael Lamkin
SEE ALSO:
OPERA; OPERETTA; ORCHESTRAL MUSIC.
Ardoin, John. The Stages of Menotti (New York: Doubleday, 1985)..
Gruen, John. Menotti: A Biography ( London: Collier Macmillan, 1978).
Amahl and the Night Visitors; Landscapes and Remembrances; The Medium; Missa O Pulchritudo; Piano Concerto; Songs and Chamber Pieces; The Telephone.