GIAN CARLO MENOTTI
July 7, 1911 to February 1, 2007

The Italian-born Gian Carlo Menotti has been called one of "America's" greatest composers, one who had the gift of setting the English language to music so that every word is understandable. He was a "crossover" artist long before the term became popular. While many of his works were originally written for Broadway or television where he drew new audiences who had never heard opera, today they are presented at the major opera houses of world. Menotti is often cited as the man who single-handedly rescued contemporary opera and who created a new genre.

Boyhood and Education
Menotti was born in Cadegliano, Italy, a small town near the Swiss border on Lake Lugano (Lucerne). His was an upper class family; a grandfather had been mayor, and the surrounding country was dotted with the villas of relatives. His father was a coffee merchant who spent much of his life in Brazil, and his mother was an amateur musician who gave all eight of her children music lessons.

He tells how, at age three or four he became lame. The doctors did not know what was wrong so his nanny took him to visit the statue of the Madonna at Sacro Monte in Varese. There the priest blessed him, and he walked! Although he didn't remember much about it, he was later convinced that it was a miracle, and the memory probably helped inspire Amahl. (Actually the only thing he really remembered from that day was that he had a pickle for lunch, his very first, and he loved pickles all his life.)

Gian Carlo started to compose at the age of five and to set poetry to music. At Christmas the children would write and produce puppet shows, very much like those in The Sound of Music. He wrote his first opera, The Death of Pierrot at the age of eleven, and he was thirteen when he enrolled in the Verdi Conservatory of Music in Milan. There he wrote his second opera, The Little Mermaid, and heard the famous conductor Arturo Toscanini at the La Scala opera house. When his mother asked the famous conductor where the boy should go to continue his studies, he recommended the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. So, at the age of seventeen, his mother took him there and left him on his own, knowing almost no English and not even sure he would be accepted. Not understanding much in class he learned the valuable skill of learning on his own. To help himself learn English he went to movies about three times a week. He soon met a fellow student and future composer, Samuel Barber, who was to become his life-long companion and collaborator. Since they both spoke French, they could converse, and Sam could help Gian Carlo understand the lessons. During the summers they went to Italy where they visited Toscanini.

The Composer
After Curtis, Menotti went to Vienna, Austria. There he wrote his opera Amelia Goes to the Ball. (At the time serious composers in Vienna were not writing operas.) It was produced by the Curtis Institute at the Philadelphia Academy of Music and was conducted by Fritz Reiner. The next year it was performed at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, receiving good reviews from the New York critics. As a result, the Italian minister of culture approached the composer and offered to launch him in Italy. However, he would have had to join the Fascist Party so he refused. Amelia was given in Italy anyhow, but orders had been given to "kill it". It was fiercely panned, and Menotti's music was made taboo in Italy until after the end of the Fascist regime.

In 1939 the composer was approached to write an opera for American radio. The result was The Old Maid and the Thief which was later adapted for the stage. He continued to write operas and other musical works and, in 1947, produced The Medium on Broadway at the Barrymore Theatre. It was one of his greatest successes and is still one of his most often performed works. Toscanini's attendance, at Menotti's invitation, caused a sensation. He saw it three times, and audiences came to see what was attracting the famous conductor. Soon The Medium was an international success and was made into a film.

His next great success was The Consul, a three-act opera (1950). In the opening night audience were not only Toscanini but his fellow composers Leopold Stokowski and Dimitri Mitropoulos. Soon Menotti was lionized and appeared on the cover of TIME. The Consul won the Drama Critics Circle Award and later a Pulitzer Prize. Laurence Olivier presented it in London. Among his other prize-winning works are The Saint of Bleecker Street (1955 Drama Critics and Pulitzer awards), which was also written for Broadway, and the libretto for Barber's Vanessa (1958 Pulitzer). He insisted on bringing his operas to Broadway where they could meet new audiences; in fact, his style came to be known as "Broadway Opera". He has been compared to Puccini but said he was more influenced by Russian and French composers. Among his later works were Goya for the Washington National Opera with Plácido Domingo and La loca (about the Spanish Queen Juana, the mother of Charles I) for San Diego Opera with Beverly Sills.

In 1951 he began work on Amahl and the Night Visitors, one of his six children's operas, and he wrote several other operas especially for television.

Other achievements
Menotti was a voracious reader and, although he was largely self-educated, his knowledge was encylopædic, especially in theatre, poetry and philosophy. During World War II he, being Italian, registered as an enemy alien but escaped internment due to influential friends. In fact, he made Italian-language broadcasts through the Office of War Information. From 1948 to 1955 he taught periodically at his alma mater Curtis.

He not only wrote, but staged and directed the premières of all of his operas. He also composed orchestral and chamber works: a violin concerto, symphonies, choral works and ballet. On the side, he wrote poetry and short stories, but he did not publish them. Some of his plays were produced, and for a time he wrote film scripts for MGM.

In 1958 he founded the Festival of Two Worlds in Italy — he visited sixty cities in Italy before deciding on the hill-town of Spoleto as its setting. The festival was designed to give young American artists experience with a mix of dance, theatre, opera, music and the visual arts. He later founded a similar festival in Charleston, South Carolina. He said:

I became so completely disenchanted with the role of the artist in contemporary society. I felt useless. Art had become what Sam Barber calls ‘the after-dinner mint of the rich'. I felt that the artist should become part of society — a needed member of society rather than just an ornament. That's why I started Spoleto. I wanted to feel needed, and I wanted to see whether with my music and my knowledge could help to recreate a so-called ideal city. My dream was not really to create a festival, but to create a small city wherein the artist would thrive and be one of its most essential members.

Later years
With the festivals, Menotti's life changed dramatically; having less time for his own music, his output diminished. From 1992-94 he was the Artistic Director of the Opera in Rome, but as he grew older, he spent less and less time in America and Italy. He bought Yester House in Scotland, choosing to live there and be isolated from his past. (The first castle there was built in the thirteenth century by Hugo Gifford who was believed to have been in league with the devil and who used Satanic powers to build its underground Goblin Hall. This still exists and can be visited, but the rest of the castle is no more. The present nearby house was built in 1789!) Menotti planned to spend his last days there and destroyed all his working papers, leaving only the final versions. While in Monaco at the age of ninety-five to prepare a special performance of The Medium, he died in the Princess Grace Hospital. He left an adopted son Francis (Chip) who inherited his estate.

Note: There is a good biography (Gruen, John: Menotti: A Biography. Macmillan, 1978) but it is thirty years old. However, many articles on his later career can be found on the Internet.

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Revised November 2007
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