Word: gian
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...composer who has come closest to being America's Verdi or Puccini. Gian-Carlo Menotti. last week took his Saint of Bleecker Street (TIME. Jan. 10) to Milan's great La Scala. Italian-born Composer Menotti, who has lived in the U.S. for 27 years, got a real gala-Scala panning from Italian critics. Wrote Rome's Giornale d'Italia: "There is not an idea, not a melody, not a note which is not either closely or distantly attributable to someone else ... If this is what it means to write opera, let's not talk...
...Fable; drama, Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; history, Paul Horgan's Great River, The Rio Grande in North American History; biography, New York Times Washington Correspondent William S. White's The Taft Story; poetry, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens; music, Gian-Carlo Menotti's The Saint of Blceker Street...
Best Musical: Gian-Carlo Menotti's The Saint of Bleecker Street...
...Three years ago the board sacked adventurous Conductor Laszlo Halasz, installed Joseph Rosenstock, who is more tradition-directed. Last year the board fired key opera staffers without Kirstein's knowledge. Last week's last-straw news: the board had ignored Kirstein's plan to have Composer Gian-Carlo Menotti supervise the opera division and renewed Conductor Rosenstock's contract against Kirstein's wishes. Director Kirstein resigned in protest. Said he: "The board operates on the theory that you can't have excellence in New York. They think of the City Center as a money...
...When Gian-Carlo Menotti was a child, at home near Milan, he was crippled in one leg. A devout nurse took him to a shrine of the Madonna, and shortly afterwards he was cured. He still believes that his cure could have been miraculous. But at the same time, Composer Menotti also believes that he does not believe: he admits to skepticism and has left the Roman Catholic Church. This contradiction has turned up in Menotti operas before (e.g., The Medium), in the shape of dramatic conflicts between some form of faith and reason. The theme is rousingly treated...