Out Spotlight

Today's was an Italian-American composer and librettist. Although he often referred to himself as an American composer, he kept his Italian citizenship. He wrote the classic Christmas opera Amahl and the Night Visitors among about two dozen other operas intended to appeal to popular taste. He is a Pulitzer Prize winner twice over, and founded the Festival dei Due Mondi (Festival of the Two World) in 1958 and it's American counterpart, the Spoleto Festival in Charleston SC in 1977. Today's Out Spotlight is Gian Carlo Monotti.

 Gian Carlo Menotti was July 7, 1911 into a wealthy family on the shores of Lake Lugano, Italy. He was the sixth of eight children of Alfonso and Ines Menotti, his father being a coffee merchant. Menotti began writing songs when he was seven years old, and at eleven wrote both the libretto and music for his first opera, The Death of Pierrot. He began his formal musical training at the Milan Conservatory in 1923.

Following her husband's death, Ines Menotti went to Colombia in a futile attempt to salvage the family's coffee business. She took Gian Carlo with her, and in 1928 she enrolled him at Philadelphia's Curtis Institute of Music, but she returned to Italy.

Armed with a letter of introduction from the wife of Arturo Toscanini, Gian Carlo studied composition at Curtis under Rosario Scalero. Fellow students at Curtis included Leonard Bernstein and Samuel Barber.

Barber became his lover and partner in life and in work; with Menotti crafting the libretto for Barber's most famous opera, Vanessa, which premiered at the Metropolitan Opera in 1958 at the age of 27.

As a student, Menotti spent much of his time with the Samuel Barber family in West Chester, Pennsylvania. After graduation, the two men bought a house together in Mount Kisco, New York, which they named "Capricorn" and shared for over forty years together before splitting.

It was at Curtis that Menotti wrote his first mature opera, Amelia Goes to the Ball (Amelia al Ballo), to his own Italian text. The Island God (which he suppressed, though its libretto was printed by the Metropolitan Opera and can be found in many libraries) and The Last Savage were the only other operas he wrote in Italian, the rest being in English. Like Wagner, he wrote the libretti of all his operas. His most successful works were composed in the 1940s and 1950s. He also taught at the Curtis Institute of Music.

He reached stardom that reached beyond the normal public for classical music because his two dozen operatic scores played not only in opera houses but on Broadway - commercially, night after night, like early precedents for Andrew Lloyd Webber. The Medium (1946), The Telephone (1947), The Consul (1950), The Saint of Bleecker Street (1954) – they poured out in rapid succession, full of big tunes, big drama, and big numbers that rewrote the grand Italian tradition as contemporary American torchsong.

His first full-length opera, The Consul, which premiered in 1950, 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). He intended to give a role to a then-unknown Maria Callas, but the producer would not have it. Menotti won a second Pulitzer Prize for his opera The Saint of Bleecker Street in 1955. With Goya, Menotti reverted to a traditional Giovane Scuola Italian style.

Above all there was Amahl and the Night Visitors, an endearingly sentimental Christmas piece about a little crippled boy who meets the Three Kings on their way to see the baby Jesus, is miraculously cured, and decides to join them at the manger. Written for American TV in 1951, it touched a national nerve and became part of the American cult of Christmas, re-broadcast year after year.

On the strength of all this he joined the glitterati. With the Kennedys at the White House, with Onassis on the yacht, with Sophia Loren here, Maria Callas there. But it wasn't just him in the social circle, it was them, he and Barber.

They are the only example know of two prominent composers doing so at the time. They threw well known parties in their upstate New York home with his & his music rooms at the far ends of the house so they could work without disturbing each other. And surprising for 1950s America, they were welcomed as a couple. In the grandest places.

The problem was came when, Barber’s star rose while Menotti’s fell. Barber appeared to be the conservative but significant author of enduring work while Menotti was sidelined as a purveyor of old-fashioned, decorative, sentimental froth. Eventually the relationship ended, although they remained close. Barber took to drinking, got ill and died. And heavy with remorse, Menotti felt obliged to leave America.

Where to go, he found the ancestral home of the Marquesses of Tweeddale: an 18th Century pile that the Tweeddales could no longer afford, not far from Edinburgh Scotland. He bought it and assumed the lifestyle of a Scottish laird – the locals called him Mr McNottie. And there he lived with his memories and a vicious, uncaged parrott for the last 30 years of his life, padding around the huge empty rooms and striking a sometimes sad figure.

But he wasn't alone. He gathered around him a devoted if unorthodox family, having adopted as his legal son a young actor, figure skater, Francis "Chip" Phelan, an whom he had known since the early 1960s. Phelan married a Rockefeller heiress and gave him two grandchildren.

And to the end, Menotti had another life – as the founder and iconic figurehead of the Spoleto Festival in Italy. Started in 1958 it was a venue for the chic and celebrated: Ezra Pound, Visconti, Rossellini, Henry Moore, Sophia Loren were just a few of the illustrious names who favoured it. In later years, beset by rows and money problems, it became less glamorous; but I remember Pavarotti, Domingo and Renée Fleming all turning up for Menotti’s 90th birthday concert (even though Pavarotti then left in a huff without singing). And in Spoleto, Menotti was revered like the Pope, living in a rented renaissance palace and waving to crowds from balconies.

In 1984 Menotti was awarded a Kennedy Center Honor for achievement in the arts, and in 1991 he was chosen Musical America's "Musician of the Year". In addition to composing operas to his own texts, on his own chosen subject matter, Menotti directed most productions of his work.

Menotti died on February 1, 2007, at the age of 95 in a hospital in Monte Carlo, Monaco, where he had a home.

In June and July 2007 the Festival of Two Worlds, dedicated the 50th Anniversary of the Festival to his memory, organised by his beloved son Francis. Menotti works performed during the festival included Maria Golovin, Landscapes and Remembrances, Missa O Pulchritudo, and The Unicorn, the Gorgon, and the Manticore.

Menotti was a one-man ancien regime: the last of a breed of composers who carried on writing operas and ballets in the old romantic tradition – heart on sleeve, emotional, and for all the world as though the age of Verdi and Puccini still existed.