Gian Carlo Menotti (; ; July 7, 1911 – February 1, 2007) was an Italian composer, librettist, director, and playwright who is primarily known for his output of 25 operas. Although he often referred to himself as an American composer, he kept his Italian citizenship and never officially became an American citizen. One of the most frequently performed opera composers of the 20th century, he wrote his most successful works in the 1940s and 1950s. Highly influenced by Giacomo Puccini and Modest Mussorgsky, Menotti further developed the verismo tradition of opera in the post-World War II era. Rejecting atonality and the aesthetic of the Second Viennese School, Menotti's music is characterized by expressive lyricism which carefully sets language to natural rhythms in ways that highlight textual meaning and underscore dramatic intent.
Like Wagner, Menotti wrote the libretti of all his operas. He wrote the classic Christmas opera Amahl and the Night Visitors (1951), along with over two dozen other operas intended to appeal to popular taste. Many of Menotti's operas enjoyed successful runs on Broadway, including two Pulitzer Prize winning works, The Consul (1950) and The Saint of Bleecker Street (1955). While all of his works used English language libretti, three of his operas also had Italian language libretti penned by the composer: Amelia Goes to the Ball (1937), The Island God (1942), and The Last Savage (1963). He founded the Festival dei Due Mondi (Festival of the Two Worlds) in Spoleto 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.
Menotti also wrote music for several ballets, many choral works, chamber music, orchestral music of varying kinds including a symphony, and stage plays. Notable among these are his cantata The Death of the Bishop of Brindisi, written in 1963, and the cantata Landscapes and Remembrances in 1976 – a descriptive work of Menotti's memories of America written for the United States Bicentennial. Also worthy of note is a small Mass commissioned by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Baltimore, entitled Mass for the Contemporary English Liturgy.
Menotti taught music composition on the faculty of the Curtis Institute of Music from 1948 to 1955. He also served as the artistic director of the Teatro dell'Opera di Roma from 1992 to 1994, and directed operas periodically for notable organizations such as the Salzburg Festival and the Vienna State Opera.
Early life and education: 1911–1933 Born in Cadegliano-Viconago, Italy, near Lake Lugano and the Swiss border, Menotti was the sixth of ten children of Alfonso and Ines Menotti. His father was a businessman and his mother a talented amateur musician. The family was financially prosperous with his father and uncle jointly operating a coffee exporting firm in Colombia. He learned to play the organ from his eccentric aunt LiLine Bianchini, who experienced religious hallucinations. He was deeply religious in his youth, and was greatly influenced by his parish priest Don Rimoldi.
Menotti's mother, who was highly influential in his musical development, sent all of her children to music lessons in the piano, violin, and cello. The family performed chamber music together, and with other musicians in the community in evenings hosted in the Menotti household.
A child prodigy, Gian Carlo began writing compositions when he was seven years old, and at eleven wrote both the libretto and music for his first opera, The Death of Pierrot. This work was performed as a home puppet show, a passion that occupied Gian Carlo's youth after he was introduced to the art by his older brother Pier Antonio. He began his formal musical training at the Milan Conservatory in 1924 at the age of 13. While at the conservatory, Menotti wrote his second childhood opera, The Little Mermaid. He spent three years studying at the conservatory, during which time he frequently attended operas at La Scala, which cemented his lifetime love for the artform.
At the age of 17, Menotti's life was dramatically altered by the death of his father. Following her husband's death, Ines Menotti and Gian Carlo moved to Colombia in a futile attempt to salvage the family's coffee business. In 1928 she enrolled him at Philadelphia's Curtis Institute of Music before returning to Italy. Armed with a letter of introduction from the wife of Arturo Toscanini, the teenager Gian Carlo studied composition at Curtis under Rosario Scalero. That same year, he met fellow Curtis schoolmate Samuel Barber, who became his partner in life as well as in their shared profession. As a student, Menotti spent much of his time with the Barber family in West Chester, Pennsylvania, and the two also spent several summer breaks in Europe attending opera performances in Vienna and in Italy while studying at Curtis.
Early career: 1933–1949
After graduating from the Curtis Institute in the spring of 1933, Menotti and Barber spent the following summer in Austria where Menotti began writing the libretto for his first mature opera, Amelia Goes to the Ball (Amelia al Ballo), to his own Italian text while staying in a small village on Lake Wolfgang. The work was inspired by the Baroness von Montechivsky whom Menotti met earlier that summer in Vienna. He spent the majority of the next four years pursuing further musical studies in Europe, including composition studies with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. He did not finish composing the music for Amelia until his return to the United States in 1937.
The Curtis Institute presented the world premiere of Amelia Goes to the Ball at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia with Margaret Daum as Amelia in April 1937, and this was soon followed by professional stagings later that year at the Lyric Opera House in Baltimore and the New Amsterdam Theatre in New York City with soprano Florence Kirk in the title role. A critical success, the work was staged by the Metropolitan Opera in 1938 with Muriel Dickson in the title role. The first international staging was in Sanremo, Italy, that same year. Amelia al ballo is the only one of Menotti's operas still to be published in its original or perhaps "complementary" Italian libretto (alongside the English):(see Ricordi editions 1937, 1976 and recent) it is an example of the traditional romantic Italianate style, with a nod to Puccini, Wolf-Ferrari, and Giordano.
The success of Amelia Goes to the Ball earned Menotti a commission to compose a radio opera for the NBC Radio Network, The Old Maid and the Thief, one of the first such works. The opera premiered in a radio broadcast on April 22, 1939, with Alberto Erede conducting the NBC Symphony Orchestra for the closing of the orchestra's 1938–1939 season. The opera was first staged in a slightly revised version by the Philadelphia Opera Company at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia in 1941. The New York Philharmonic chose to program portions of the opera in 1942 with conductor Fritz Busch leading the ensemble. The first staged production in New York was presented by the New York City Opera in April 1948 in a double bill with Amelia Goes to the Ball, both operas directed by the composer.
In 1943, Menotti and Barber purchased "Capricorn", a house north of Manhattan in suburban Mount Kisco, New York. The home served as their artistic retreat up until 1972. Many of their major works were composed at this house. The two frequently hosted salon gatherings at Capricorn with other well known composers, artists, musicians, and intellectuals in attendance. American author William Goyen was a frequent visitor to the house and later Goyen's lover, American artist Joseph Glasco, became friends with and visited Menotti and Barber.
Menotti's third opera, The Island God, was written for the Metropolitan Opera where it premiered to poor reviews in 1942. He believed this work failed because the libretto he wrote relied too heavily on metaphysics which resulted in an overly pretentious philosophical and symbolic work that failed to connect with audiences. In interviews he expressed that this failure taught him "how not to write an opera". Following this, he wrote his first dramatic play without music, A Copy of Madame Aupic, in 1943. The work was not staged until 1947 when it premiered in New Milford, Connecticut. Other works from this period include a ballet, Sebastian (1944), and the Piano Concerto in F Major (1945) which were written before Menotti returned to opera with The Medium in 1946. Commissioned by the Alice M. Ditson Fund, this fourth opera premiered at Columbia University and then transferred to a critically successful run on Broadway at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre in 1947. This Broadway production also included Menotti's fifth opera, the short one act opera The Telephone, or L'Amour à trois, as a prelude to performances of The Medium. These operas became Menotti's first internationally successful works, notably receiving critically acclaimed productions in Paris and London in 1949 and later touring Europe in 1955 under the sponsorship of the United States Department of State with musical forces led by Thomas Schippers. The Medium was also made into a motion picture in 1951 starring Marie Powers and Anna Maria Alberghetti and competed in the 1952 Cannes Film Festival. It is widely regarded as one of the finest examples of opera on film ever made.
In the midst of this success, Menotti also composed music for the 1948 ballet Errand in the Maze for the Martha Graham Dance Company, and wrote two screenplays for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer which were ultimately never developed into films. He accepted a position teaching music composition on the faculty of the Curtis Institute in 1948, a post he remained in until 1955. His notable pupils included composers Olga Gorelli, Lee Hoiby, Stanley Hollingsworth, Leonard Kastle, George Rochberg, and Luigi Zaninelli.
Middle career: 1950–1969
The 1950s marked the pinnacle of Menotti's critical acclaim, beginning with his first full-length opera, The Consul, which premiered on Broadway at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre in 1950. The work 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). American soprano Patricia Neway starred as the tormented protagonist Magda Sorel, for which she won the Donaldson Award for Best Actress in a Musical in 1950. Menotti apparently intended to give a role to a then-unknown Maria Callas, but the producer would not have it. The work has become a part of the established opera repertory, and has been performed in more than a dozen languages and over 20 countries.
In 1951, Menotti wrote his Christmas opera Amahl and the Night Visitors for NBC which was inspired by Hieronymus Bosch's painting Adoration of the Magi (c. 1485–1500). It was the first opera ever written for television in America, and first aired on Christmas Eve, 1951 with Chet Allen as Amahl and Rosemary Kuhlmann as his mother. The opera was such a success that the broadcasting of Amahl and the Night Visitors became an annual Christmas tradition. The work has also been staged by numerous opera companies, universities, and other institutions, and became one of the most frequently performed operas of the 20th century. The work remains Menotti's most popular work.