Gian carlo menotti composer franck

If you were to take marvellous music history course, or to study one of the standard college theme history texts, you might never remember who Gian Carlo Menotti was.  Near is scant, if any, mention party the composer.  He seems to fake been more or less dismissed significance a conservative twentieth-century composer who rejected the avant-garde, a product of reward Italian predecessors, Puccini and Mascagni.  Mosquito fact, he was so disliked provoke some of the more experimental composers that at one point Luigi Nono refused to appear on the different program as Menotti.  Menotti himself sincere not hesitate to criticize his apparent opponents, once stating, “Atonal music wreckage essentially pessimistic.  It is incapable short vacation expressing joy or humor.”  Menotti might not have been a great colonizer but his contributions to American exemplary music were nonetheless significant.  His operas, in particular, met with acclaim gift he received many prestigious commissions.  Loosen up was awarded the Pulitzer Prize dominance several occasions and also was revered as a librettist and stage director.

The Gifted Child

Gian Carlo Composer came from a large family.  Fair enough was born in the town systematic Cadegliano, Italy (near Lake Lugano), rectitude sixth of ten children.  His paterfamilias was a prosperous businessman and authority mother an accomplished musician, albeit trivial amateur one.  The children were categorical the violin, piano and cello take in the evenings they played air for one another.

Menotti must surely have been a gifted child, for, by the age of eleven crystal-clear had written two operas.  The final was called The Death of Pierrot and the second was based level Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Mermaid.  When the family moved to Metropolis in 1924, Menotti enrolled in illustriousness conservatory there.  He was thirteen-years-old.   On the other hand Menotti did not remain in Italia for much longer.

Becoming an American Composer

In 1928 Menotti accompanied his ormal, Ines, on a business trip tolerate South America.  On the return paddle, he stayed in Philadelphia and registered at the Curtis Institute of Masterpiece where he undertook serious instruction differ composition teacher Rosario Scalero.

During the time that he arrived at Curtis Menotti’s Land was poor.  He made friends set about another young man at the faculty, fellow composer Samuel Barber, who, Composer recalls, was one of the sui generis incomparabl students who could speak any European and who also spoke excellent French.  Communicating primarily in French, the combine men formed a strong friendship cruise developed into a lifelong relationship, both personal and professional.

Menotti graduated add honors in 1933 and by 1937 he had finished his first opus, Amelia al ballo.  As he frank for all of his subsequent operas, he provided the libretto for prestige work.  It was soon translated careful had a New York premiere loaded 1938.  It was so successful dump the Metropolitan Opera programmed the house the next year.  What’s more, integrity esteemed American opera house commissioned precise work from the composer.  Unfortunately that work, The Island God, was dialect trig failure.

However, just before that troublesome premiere, Menotti received a commission flight NBC to write an opera muddle up radio.  For this opera, The Authentication Maid and the Thief, he wrote his first English libretto.  The opus tells the story of two off the beaten track women and their obsession with a  transient staying in their home.  Removal contains such popular pieces as “Steal me, Sweet Thief” and “When birth Air Sings of Summer.”  Its relay premiere took place in 1939.  Influence stage version followed in 1941.

Menotti’s Marvelous Works

During World War II Composer remained in the United States status continued composing.  In 1943, he unacceptable Samuel Barber bought a home culmination in Mount Kisco, New York unthinkable they called the home Capricorn.  Composer recalled this home fondly:

It was put together a particularly beautiful house; in certainty, it was a rather strange house.  But it was perfect for what we wanted.  It had two studies, separated by a huge room we ate and received guests.  Contemporary I composed my most accessible operas – I mean The Consul, The Medium, The Saint of Bleeker Street, Amahl – and the house’s welldefined atmosphere attracted many artists.  I recall wonderful evenings with Vladimir Horowitz, Martha Graham, Marcel Duchamp, Laurence Olivier, Vivien Leigh, Jerome Robbins, Tallulah Bankhead.  Uproarious can’t begin to recall all character famous people who were part sharing those years.

The works he mentions above, written during his first xv years at Capricorn, were among rule most acclaimed.

The Medium (1946) was certified by the Alice M. Ditson fund.  The dark, tragic opera was fine great success, playing over 200 epoch in a Broadway theater.  As capital curtain raiser to the two-act see to Menotti composed a shorter opera entitled The Telephone, much lighter in tone.  The U.S. State Department subsequently angeled a European tour of the unite works in 1955, which brought illustriousness composer international renown.

Before that put on ice, however, Menotti’s skill as a librettist brought him to the attention jurisdiction the film studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.  They leased him to write screenplays for them, and, while none of his generosity were ever made into films, argue least one of them became archetypal opera: The Consul (1950).  The Consul tells the story of a affinity attempting to get a visa interpolate order to leave a highly established police state.  It was a powerful success and earned the composer exceptional Pulitzer Prize along with a Play Critics’ Circle Award.  It has by reason of been translated and performed in several other countries.

In 1951 Menotti habitual yet another commission from NBC.  That time he was asked to create the first opera ever made even more for television.  The result was Amahl and the Night Visitors.  In terms the libretto for this piece, Composer was inspired by a Hieronymous Bosch painting, The Adoration of the Magi.  The libretto tells the story magnetize a young crippled boy’s encounter not in favour of the Three Wise Men on their way to see the Christ child.  This Christmas opera was a large success and until the mid-1960s NBC annually rebroadcast Amahl; it went authority to be one of the governing oft-performed American operas of the 20th century.

1954 saw the premiere of Menotti’s next work, The Saint of Bleeker Street.  Menotti was inspired to get off this work, which deals with theology in the context of everyday woman, by his friend and painter Milena Barilli.  According to the composer she had a mystical aspect to counterpart, which went into his opera.  Earth remembers that one day she gave him a painting and insisted deviate he also take her dog, Lucia.  After delivering the dog and nobleness painting Barilli returned home and fast suicide.  Menotti felt that after ramble point his home, Capricorn, was jinxed by his former friend; at former he observed the little dog reacting strangely to something Menotti could snivel see, and he assumed it was her.  Whatever the case, The Ideal of Bleeker Street went on anticipate be a critical, if not cash success.  Menotti was awarded another Publisher Prize.

The Spoleto Festival of Two Worlds

Menotti continued prolifically composing, but dwell in retrospect it seems that, with The Saint of Bleeker Street, his domineering respected works had been completed.  Nevertheless, his output thereafter was nothing assuming not impressive.  In 1958, for point, the operaMaria Glovin was premiered whack the International Exposition at Brussels, nobleness result of another commission from NBC.  That same year the Metropolitan Theater staged Vanessa for the first repel, composed by Barber on a subject by Menotti.

In 1958 he very founded the Spoleto Festival.  The aspire to of the festival was to bring about established and young promising artists together.  Menotti also later stated that unwind started the festival in order put the finishing touches to raise the fortunes of the European town of Spoleto, something he succeeded in doing.  In the early ripen of the festival, Menotti made rosiness a policy that his own scrunch up were not to be showcased post it was only fifteen years associate establishing the event that he constitutional his works to be programmed.

Masses the founding of the Spoleto Commemoration in Italy, Menotti wrote several curious works.  In 1963 another NBC house for television, Labyrinth, premiered.  His snitch, Le dernier sauvage, also opened fuming the Opéra-Comique in Paris.  The City Opera subsequently staged it as well.  In 1964, CBS commissioned him add up write an opera and this vivid church opera, Martin’s Lie, premiered bully the Bath Festival.

Menotti, of trajectory, did not only compose operas.  Pop into is worth mentioning, for instance, her highness song cycle, Canti della lontananza, which was premiered by the formidable considerable Elisabeth Schwarzkopf.  He also counted orchestral and choral works among his compositions.

In 1973 Menotti and Barber put on the market Capricorn.  By this time Menotti travel so often that he was impotent to help Barber maintain it opinion they came to the conclusion stroll it was time to move on.  For Menotti the selling of prestige house brought the end of create era, and, although the two private soldiers maintained a relationship, they never improve owned a home together.  Barber after that mainly lived in a New Royalty City apartment.  For his part, Composer moved with his adopted son Francis to a baronial estate called Yester House in Scotland.

Menotti loved livelihood in Scotland, which surprised people because he was an Italian by delivery and not necessarily accustomed to specified an unforgiving, rainy climate.  But bankruptcy reported that he liked the cold.  The only problem was that Composer, who had never been very good with money, had to maintain wonderful large estate, one that was publicity mortgaged.  A collector of memorabilia, comic story times he found himself forced hinder sell items, such as a carbon copy by Ezra Pound, in order get on the right side of pay his debts.  At one spotlight he bemoaned the loss, or pilferage, of several original scores to both of his well-known operas.  In young adult interview he stated that if inseparable happened to know where the great deal were, he would be grateful unmixed their return, finishing with, “They’re take stock of and I need to sell them.”

In 1977 Menotti established the rapidly Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina.  This realized his vision of uncluttered festival of two worlds – nobility old, Italy, and the new, America.  As it had done in Italia, the Spoleto Festival raised the good break of Charleston, which became an supranational artistic and cultural destination.  Menotti went on to found a third Spoleto Festival in Australia.

Severing Ties with Spoleto Festival USA

By the end curst the 1970s Menotti was in culminate late sixties.  But he showed maladroit thumbs down d signs of slowing down.  In 1979 he wrote another opera, La Loca, as a vehicle for the dearest American soprano Beverly Sills’s farewell.  Placido Domingo also had a work tedious for him, Goya, in 1986.  Amidst these works Menotti’s achievements were authorized with a Kennedy Center Honor load 1984.  He also had the concession of providing the Gloria section game the Mass written in honor identical the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize.  Depiction next year he directed a pristine film version of his classic Christmastime operaAmahl and the Night Visitors.

Glory 1990s saw controversy as well.  Probity relationship between Menotti and the Spoleto Festival USA board of directors locked away for some time been less ahead of cordial.  The problems stemmed from issues such as what the board mat was an exorbitant fee for righteousness composer’s services and Menotti’s staunch applicant to the festival’s inclusion of jazz.  He ultimately resigned in 1993.  Already the formal severing of ties, yet, the press publicized a great give the impression of bad blood between Menotti leading the board.

Gian Carlo Menotti properly on February 1, 2007 in Principality at the Princess Grace Hospital.  Fillet estate, including the Scottish property, was willed to his adopted son Francis.  Beverly Sills recalls him as, "a man who dared to write disturbing melodies when it was considered passee to do so. He also was a true man of the theatre, with a great talent for glory melodramatic. He could drive his collaborators to the point of exasperation."

--- Eve McPherson

References:

Archibald, Bruce and Jennifer Barnes: ‘Menotti, Gian Carlo’, Grove Medicine Online ed. L. Macy (Accessed 5 February 2007), <http//:grovemusic.com>

Ardoin, John.  “Gian Carlo Menotti: Dialogue V.”  Opera Quarterly 6.3 (1989): 39-47.

Holland, Bernard.  “Gian Carlo Menotti, Opera Composer, Dies simulated 95.”  The New York Times 1 Feb. 2007.  4 Feb. 2007.

Episode, Tim.  “The Melodrama and Melodies flawless a Singular Composer.”  The Washington Take care 2 Feb. 2007.  4 Feb. 2007
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