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Composer, Spoleto founder Menotti is dead
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CLASSICAL BLOG
We’ve got several items bubbling on the classical-music scene tonight. Unusually, I skipped the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra’s Thursday evening concert — all Mendelssohn, conducted by Nicholas McGegan — and instead attended a first-Thursday-of-each-month meeting of the Atlanta Study Score Group, where local composers gather to play their music and have it discussed. I’m planning to write a survey of the Atlanta’s composer scene, and this group plays a key role.
Did you go to the Atlanta Symphony’s concert? Tell me about it in the comments field below.
And composer-director-librettist-impresario Gian Carlo Menotti has died.
Appreciation Gian Carlo Menotti (July 7, 1911 - Feb. 1, 2007)
Gian Carlo Menotti, who died Thursday in Monaco, age 95, held a strong presence in Atlanta and over the South.
Winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, Menotti was one of the most frequently performed opera composers in these parts, as everywhere in America — especially with students and community-based opera companies. And in 1977 he helped found the Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, S.C., one of the most vital and artistically sophisticated multi-arts festivals in the country.
The AP’s Menotti obituary gets a few details wrong, but you can read it here.
With Menotti’s death, there’s now a strong possibility that Spoleto USA and its estranged sibling, the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy, may rejoin in some fashion.
A complicated man in his private life, Menotti’s operas were conservative in attitude, clinging to the golden age of Puccini and the Italian verissimo school, of fiery passions, theatrical intimacy and warmly romantic orchestrations. A theme ran through his operas, of the “gifted” individual (i.e the artist) who’s scorned by philistine society.
Menotti’s innovation was in combining lightly sung vocal parts with the natural patterns of American speech, as a sort of lightly sung parlando style that didn’t require deluxe operatic training.
It’s a combination that will likely keep his best operas popular in perpetuity: “The Old Maid and the Thief” (commissioned by NBC radio, premiered in 1939), “The Medium” (1946), “The Consul” (1950), “Amahl and the Night Visitors” (commissioned by NBC television, 1951) and “The Saint of Bleeker Street” (1954).
In recent years, each of these operas had been performed in and around Atlanta, often by Capitol City Opera, a local community troupe.
And for its 30th season, last summer, Spoleto Festival USA continued to maintain much of its founder’s original vision, and did record-breaking box office. It’s a winning formula — now much copied —established by Menotti: multi-disciplinary programming, unflinchingly high-brow artistic standards and cultural tourism in a picturesque setting.
Menotti was born July 7, 1911, in Cadegliano, a lake-shore town in northern Italy. His parents were prosperous coffee importers, and music was part of the household. By legend, he started composing operas as a child, and had his first performance when he was 11. He entered the Milan Conservatory at 13.
In 1928, his family now skirting financial troubles, he was recommended to continue his studies at the tuition-free Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Although he retained his Italian passport, Menotti afterwards considered himself an American composer.
At Curtis he met Samuel Barber, a fellow composer and student, and the two soon started a decades-long partnership. They lived in a house called Capricorn, in New York State, traveled the world together and Menotti wrote librettos for Barber’s operas, including “Vanessa.”
After “Bleeker Street,” in ‘54, however, Menotti’s compositional skills started a long slow decline, and by 1958 he’d reinvented himself as an impresario. He founded the Festival of Two Worlds in the Umbrian hill town of Spoleto, Italy, designed to showcase American talent in Europe. It was an enormous success.
By the mid-1970s, the restless Menotti was looking for new projects. He’d met an aspiring actor, split with Barber, sold Capricorn and later adopted the actor as his son, Francis “Chip” Menotti. (Chip later married a member of the Rockefeller family; Menotti gave them his 100-room Scottish castle as a wedding present. The whole episode is — how to put this? — one of the most curious in music history.)
At about the same time, with help from Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, he’d hoped to launch a festival in Harlem. That plan fell through, but setting up camp in a historic Southern town was seen as a viable option, someplace in need of economic development, with cheap rents and lots of old theaters.
With others doing all the ground work, Menotti blessed the choice of Charleston and took charge of the new festival.
“One of Gian Carlo’s favorite sayings was ‘I don’t want the arts to be the after-dinner mints for the rich,’” recalls Nigel Redden, who joined Spoleto USA in the mid 1980s and is now its general director. “It sounds almost Mao-ist, but Gian Carlo was the opposite of a socialist. He liked to collect people with titles and an aristocratic glow.”
What’s more, Redden continues, “He was incredibly good at reading people, finding their talent and getting them to work for him,” Redden says. “Nothing at the festival moved without his approval, but he could be extremely frustrating to work with. He’d veto a detailed plan outright, then sit and wait for you to come up with another.”
Menotti’s management style and philosophy led to a nasty and well publicized split in 1993. The composer-impresario had said he was tired of wrangling with city officials and his own festival administrators (including Redden).
For his part, Redden recently spoke of Menotti’s extreme reluctance to institutionalize Spoleto USA — rejecting even basic plans for stability like an endowment or buildings. “He preferred to not make commitments till the last minute, he hated being tied down as an artist,” Redden says. “That’s refreshing but for a festival that has to sell advance tickets, also dangerous.”
Still, Redden recalls, “he was the most charming person imaginable to have dinner with, such diversity of interests, the power to think broadly, incredible energy. Even at the worst times, when we were at dagger’s draw over the festival, he was always charming to me.”
Menotti hoped Spoleto USA, no longer under his guidance, would simply go away. He cut all ties between the original Spoleto and Charleston’s version. Along the way, another Menotti Spoleto, in Melbourne, Australia, also grew into a major international arts gathering.
Redden recently spoke of an opening to restore a creative partnership. “I’d love to see the two Spoletos [Italy and Charleston] rejoined in some way sharing opera productions, for example. But that’s something that can be talked about only after Gian Carlo dies. He’d never stand for it.”
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