Word: menotti
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...fell in love at first sight. It's the sort of city I'm glad to be married to." The indefatigable Composer-Director-Impresario Gian Carlo Menotti was at it again, in what could be the greatest -and riskiest-romance of his long career in music and the performing arts: launching an American version of Italy's Spoleto Festival in Charleston, S.C. Menotti created the original festival in June 1958, transforming the quiet old Umbrian hill town of Spoleto into an international center of the arts...
Charleston's clean and narrow streets, cloistered gardens and the pastel colors of its colonial houses readily ratify Menotti's sense of what makes a good set. As the twelve-day festival began last week, the question was whether the exquisitely languid dowager city would prove a worthy audience...
Somewhat hesitantly, it did. Italy's Spoleto title, Festival of Two Worlds, suggests that Menotti had transatlantic ambitions when he moved into Spoleto 20 years ago. The site search for the U.S. half of the enterprise did not begin until 1973, however; New Orleans and San Antonio were among the places considered. Says Conductor Christopher Keene, Spoleto's music director and the first member of the staff to advocate Charleston: "It had a combination of positive and negative values-a highly developed aesthetic and architectural sense combined with a relatively undernourished cultural life...
...Hero is apparently in tended both as humorous metaphor and, in Menotti's words, as "a gentle, good-natured plea for Americans to wake up to reality, to abandon self-congratulatory illusions, to return to their former rugged individualism." The opera invites easy comparisons. There is a tape-erasing scene (David's awakening has been recorded); though the Nixon tapes are not mentioned, the point is obvious. Operatic comparisons are also in order. The Hero is a reverse twist on Puccini's Gianni Schicchi, that maudlin, heavy-handed tale about the impersonation of a dead...
...trouble with The Hero is that it has so little going for it, not even a ma ture satirical point of view. It is the kind of morality fable that a Thurber might have conceived. Menotti has dealt with it as though he were writing for Nor man Lear...