Word: menotti
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...OPERA (NBC, 3-4 p.m.). Gian Carlo Menotti's Christmas opera, Amahl and the Night Visitors, a rebroadcast of last year's performance starring Kurt Yaghjian as Amahl. Color...
...Paris apartment glitters like an open jewel box. Eggs made of jade and amethyst nest on a coffee table, and an 18th century chandelier supports candles set in gold. One night, Premier Georges Pompidou and Franchise Sagan may come to dinner, the next Marlene Dietrich and Gian Carlo Menotti...
Died. Samuel Chotzinoff, 74, NBC's classical-music chief since 1941, who lured his good friend Arturo Toscanini back from Italy to conduct for NBC, became what some called "vice president for Toscanini," stayed on after the maestro retired to create topflight TV opera, commissioned Menotti's Amahl and the Night Visitors, started Leontyne Price on her way to stardom; of heart disease; in Manhattan...
Fool & School. Menotti moves through music like a troop ship avoiding U-boats-back and forth, in and out. He darts from failure (Labyrinth) to triumph (The Death of the Bishop of Brindisi) with great agility, but nothing he has written since 1955 can approach the genius of The Saint of Bleecker Street or even The Consul. Aside from one or two pleasant arias and one superb septet, there is very little in the Savage that suggests its composer's grand reputation. The music could have been written any time after 1850, and the libretto could have been improved...
...excuse or two remains. The libretto was a translation from Menotti's Italian (but since his English is good enough to charm flowers into bloom, it is a puzzle why he put up with such a poor job). Menotti is simply not glib enough to be much of a humorist; he suffers a naiveté that is a virtue as well as a vice. He is a man who is truly touched by life. As his past masterworks nobly demonstrate, a passion for the world can be as much a blessing to the composer as in this case...