Word: carlos
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Gian-Carlo Menotti had good reason for counting every patron. For production in the close academic air of Columbia University, he had composed a compact little two-act opera called The Medium, and it had gone on Broadway. It was a grim and eerie story of an old faker who finally, at one of her seances, feels the touch of one of the spirits she has pretended to reach for so many years, and consequently goes mad. It was hardly a cheery subject; moreover, it was all 'opera. Every line and word was sung, and its music yielded nothing...
...youthful Gian-Carlo ("a beautiful child until my nose began to grow") first thought of becoming a composer when he was six; he remembers setting "the most erotic verses of D'Annunzio to angelic little tunes." It was a marionette theater, which his mother gave him when he was nine, that decided his course. Before long, he was pulling the strings of 50 puppets, making all the costumes and inventing all the stories-most of them about dragons, princesses, ogres and death. "We Italians are clowns in a way," he says in softly accented English, "but fundamentally...
...Cocktail Party (TIME, Jan. 30). The award for the best musical play went to The Consul, written, composed and directed by Gian-Carlo Menotti (TIME, March...
...story of Turandot comes from the same shop as Prokofiev's delightful The Love for Three Oranges, but it is a far less juicy piece of fruit. Puccini's librettists, like Prokofiev, took their story from an 18th Century "fable," i.e., play, of Count Carlo Gozzi, who in turn had been inspired by a Chinese-Persian legend about a beautiful but petulant princess of ancient Cathay. The princess announces she will marry any man of noble blood who can answer three riddles; if he misses an answer, he loses his head...
With his hit shows The Medium and The Telephone (TIME, June 30, 1947), Gian-Carlo Menotti had already proved that he could sell pocket-sized opera to Broadway. Last week a first-night Broadway audience bought his first full three-acter, The Consul, and bravoed for more...