Gian Carlo Menotti

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. 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. 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==

in 1944 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. It is widely regarded as one of the finest examples of opera on film ever made. Lee Hoiby, Stanley Hollingsworth, Leonard Kastle, George Rochberg, and Luigi Zaninelli. ==Middle career: 1950–1969==

'' which inspired Menotti's Amahl and the Night Visitors (Metropolitan Museum, Object Number: 13.26) 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 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. This work was also awarded the Drama Critics' Circle Award for best musical and the New York Music Critics' Circle Award for the best opera. While working on The Unicorn, the Gorgon, and the Manticore', Menotti crafted the libretto for Barber's most famous opera, Vanessa, which premiered at the Metropolitan Opera in 1958. 1963 was a particularly busy year for Menotti. His television opera Labyrinth was premiered by the NBC Opera Theatre. Unlike Amahl and the Night Visitors, this opera was never intended to be transferred from television to the stage and was written with the intention of utilizing special camera effects that were unique to television. That same year the opera The Last Savage premiered at the Opéra-Comique in Paris, and that work was given a lavish production at the Metropolitan Opera in 1964. The opera was subsequently filmed with the same cast for television under the direction of Kirk Browning, and was broadcast nationally by CBS for the opera's United States premiere on May 30, 1965. In 1967 Thomas Schippers succeeded Menotti as director of the Festival of Two Worlds, although he continued on as President of the festival's board of directors for several more decades. ==Later career: 1970–2007==

In 1970 Menotti made the difficult decision to end his lengthy romantic relationship with Samuel Barber. Barber had battled depression and alcoholism following the harsh critical reaction to his 1966 opera Antony and Cleopatra which had a negative impact on his creative productivity and his relationship with Menotti.' While there, he jokingly stated his Scottish neighbors referred to him as "Mr McNotti". In 1974, he adopted Francis "Chip" Phelan, an American actor and figure skater he had known since the early 1960s. Chip, and later his wife, lived with Menotti at Yester House. The first of these was the cantata in nine parts for soloists, chorus and orchestra, "Landscapes and Remembrances," which premiered on May 8 in a performance by the Bel Canto Chorus and Milwaukee Symphony in Milwaukee. In 1977 Menotti founded Spoleto Festival USA, a companion festival to his Spoleto Festival (the other of its Two Worlds), in Charleston, South Carolina. 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. In 1986, he extended the concept to a Spoleto Festival in Melbourne, Australia. Menotti was the artistic director during the period of 1986–88, but after three festivals there, he decided to withdraw – and took the naming rights with him. The Melbourne Spoleto Festival has now become the Melbourne International Arts Festival. Menotti left Spoleto USA in 1993 to take the helm of the Rome Opera. In spite of these festival's claims on Menotti's time, which included directing plays as well as operas, he maintained an active artistic career. Many of his later operas are directed towards children, both as subjects and as performers, including The Egg (1976), The Trial of the Gypsy (1978), Chip and his Dog (1979), A Bride from Pluto (1982), The Boy who Grew too Fast (1982), and his final opera The Singing Child (1993). His last opera for adults, The Wedding Day, premiered in Seoul, South Korea, in conjunction with the 1988 Summer Olympics conducted by Daniel Lipton. In 1992, Menotti was appointed artistic director of the Teatro dell'Opera di Roma, a post he maintained for two years before being asked to resign over conflicts with the theatre's managers involving Menotti's insistence of staging Wagner's Lohengrin. In honour of the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize, the American Choral Directors Association commissioned Gloria as part of the Mass celebrating the occasion. In 1996 Menotti directed his second filmed version of Amahl and the Night Visitors. Menotti died on February 1, 2007, at the age of 95, at Princess Grace Hospital in Monaco, where he had a home. ==Musical style and critical assessment==

Menotti's style was particularly influenced by Giacomo Puccini and Modest Mussorgsky, and he further developed the verismo tradition of opera in the post-World War II era. Kerman's scathing attack on Menotti was the beginning of an ambivalent relationship with music criticism for the composer which increased in the critical climate of the 1960s in which reviewers favored serialism and the musical avant-garde over Menotti's Italian verismo-inspired style. Viewed as a regressive musical conservative in this period, critics tended to dismiss his work as derivative or overly melodramatic. This negative reaction to Menotti's music continued into the 1980s, but then softened as tastes shifted away from serialism and the avant-garde towards neo-romanticism. Writing in The Independent at the time of Menotti's death in 2007, music critic Peter Dickinson wrote: The reaction against Menotti's popularity was, for a time, disproportionately extreme. The movement towards neo-romanticism during the last 20 years has tended to favour Barber, who used an excellent libretto from Menotti for his grand opera Vanessa, produced at the Met in 1958. But for sheer theatrical craft and human curiosity, sustained by his own complex emotional make-up, Menotti created a telling verismo of the Second World War era. == List of Menotti's operas ==

Sources: • The Death of Pierrot (1922) • The Little Mermaid (1923, lost) • Amelia Goes to the Ball (Amelia al ballo) (1937) • The Old Maid and the Thief, radio opera (1939) • The Island God (1942) • The Medium (1946) • ''The Telephone, or L'Amour à trois'' (1947) • The Consul (1950) • Amahl and the Night Visitors, television opera (1951) • The Saint of Bleecker Street (1954) • 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) • A Bride from Pluto (1982) • The Boy Who Grew Too Fast (1982) • Goya (1986), with Plácido Domingo in the title role • The Wedding Day (Giorno di Nozze) (1988) • The Singing Child (1993) ==Other works==

• Pastoral and Dance for Strings and Piano (1934) • Sebastian, ballet (1944) • Piano Concerto (1945) • Errand into the Maze, ballet (1947) • Symphonic poem, Apocalypse (1951) • Violin Concerto (1952) • Ricercare and Toccata on a Theme from The Old Maid and the Thief (1953) • The Unicorn, the Gorgon, and the Manticore (1956), a madrigal fable for chorus, instruments, and dancers • The Death of the Bishop of Brindisi (1963) • Canti della lontananza for voice and piano (1961) • Triple Concerto a tre (1969) • Suite for Two Cellos and Piano (1973) • Fantasia for Cello and Orchestra (1975) • Symphony No. 1, Halcyon (1976) • Landscapes and Remembrances (1977) • Cantilena and Scherzo for harp and string quartet (1977) • ''Missa 'O Pulchritudo''' (1979) mass with inserted text • Moans, Groans, Cries And Sighs (A Composer At Work), AATBBB, a cappella (1981) • Muero porque no muero, cantata for St. Teresa (1982) • Nocturne for Soprano, String Quartet and Harp (1982) • Five Songs for voice and piano (1983) • Double-Bass Concerto (1983) • My Christmas, for chorus and orchestra (1987) • For the Death of Orpheus (1990), cantata for tenor, chorus and orchestra • Oh llama de amor viva (1991) • Trio for Violin, Clarinet and Piano (1996) • ''Jacob's Prayer'' (1997) ==Honors==

In 1984 Menotti was awarded a Kennedy Center Honor for achievement in the arts, and in 1991 he was chosen as ''Musical America's''' "Musician of the Year". In 1997, he was awarded the Brock Commission from the American Choral Directors Association. In 2010, the main theatre in Spoleto was renamed as the Teatro Nuovo Gian Carlo Menotti to honour his role as creator and spirit of the festival. ==Publications==

Vocal scores of his compositions: • Amahl and the Night Visitors: Vocal Score. G. Schirmer Inc., 1986. . • The Telephone: Vocal Score. G. Schirmer Inc., 1986. . • The Medium: Vocal Score. G. Schirmer Inc., 1986. . • Mass for the Contemporary English Liturgy. G. Schirmer Inc., 1990. ==See also==