Word: menotti
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...vernacular for the Viennese commercial theater, stuffy high art just because it is 200 years old and occasionally performed at the Met? That would be news to Mozart, who craved popular esteem and pointed to it as a proof of artistry. Are Bernstein's Candide, Gian Carlo Menotti's The Saint of Bleecker Street and George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess frivolous musicals just because they were first performed on the Great White...
Amid the shambles of Gian Carlo Menotti's opera Goya, which got its world premiere in Washington this month, there was one bright spot: at least the sets are reusable. One of them could double as Lillas Pastia's tavern in Carmen; another might suit Violetta's death in La Traviata. But as for Menotti's already recycled libretto and music, there can be no future...
...Italian-born composer, 75, has long purveyed a brand of derivative, pseudoromantic opera, such as The Consul and The Saint of Bleecker Street, which both somehow won Pulitzer Prizes in the '50s and still cling to life on the edges of repertory. Although it has been years since Menotti has had a hit, his name still means opera to those for whom annual Christmas telecasts of the treacly Amahl and the Night Visitors were a cultural high point. Goya, however, is a new low: a brazen melange of elements from Traviata and Puccini's La Rondine, served up with music...
...Menotti's musical wares -- Puccini with a little water, Mussorgsky with the Mussorgsky removed -- may once have been serviceable. But in Goya, and in its equally forlorn predecessor La Loca, written in 1979 for Beverly Sills, the music no longer has any discernible creative impulse; instead it seems to have been composed by the yard, measured to fit and then snipped off with blunt pinking shears. Menotti has recently confessed that "I have my doubts about how important my music is." After Goya, he may be the only one who does...
Violinist Itzhak Perlman, composer Gian-Carlo Menotti, artist Frank Stella, actress Glenn Close, and a host of others in the arts will attend the dedication, Maybank said...