Missouri Classical Music News and Notes

Though critics often dismissed Mr. Menotti’s music as maudlin and unadventurous, many of them still celebrated his impressive lyric gifts, his deft touch with orchestral sound and his talent for making opera comprehensible and enjoyable for people who had previously shunned it. Of critics he once said, “They often spoil my breakfast but never my lunch.”

His contemporaries, too, were sometimes unkind. Igor Stravinsky was dismissive of Mr. Menotti’s musical language. The composer Luigi Nono withdrew from a project rather than allow his music to appear on the same program as Mr. Menotti’s.

Yet Mr. Menotti’s Christmas classic, “Amahl and the Night Visitors,” has been performed more than 2,500 times, often by amateur companies and on high school stages, since it was created for television in 1951.

Mr. Menotti’s works, including “The Medium,” “The Consul,” “The Telephone” and “The Saint of Bleecker Street” all showed that opera could sustain itself in a Broadway theater, something that Kurt Weill and George Gershwin managed to do only sporadically.

Mr. Menotti’s involvement with the musical theater was complete. He composed 25 operas, almost all in English. He wrote his own librettos and usually staged his own works.

Among his works is the first opera composed for radio, the most popular Christmas opera, possibly the first opera in which a telephone plays a principal role (Poulenc's came more than a decade later), an opera about aliens, and a masterpiece about life under totalitarian rule (which was also the first time that suicide by gas oven made it to the stage) . . .

Some of his works were Broadway successes. And he created one of the finest music festivals [includes embedded music video].