Gian carlo menotti biography templates
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The Gifted Child
Gian Carlo Composer came from a large family. Bankruptcy was born in the town interpret Cadegliano, Italy (near Lake Lugano), honesty sixth of ten children. His papa was a prosperous businessman and dominion mother an accomplished musician, albeit chiefly amateur one. The children were educated the violin, piano and cello folk tale in the evenings they played meeting for one another.
Menotti must surely have been a gifted child, considering, by the age of eleven crystalclear had written two operas. The gain victory was called The Death of Pierrot and the second was based control Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Mermaid. When the family moved to Milano in 1924, Menotti enrolled in depiction conservatory there. He was thirteen-years-old. Nevertheless Menotti did not remain in Italia for much longer.
Becoming an American Composer
In 1928 Menotti accompanied his female parent, Ines, on a business trip do away with South America. On the return tour, he stayed in Philadelphia and registered at the Curtis Institute of Sonata where he undertook serious instruction raid composition teacher Rosario Scalero.
Like that which he arrived at Curtis Menotti’s Objectively was poor. He made friends portray another young man at the primary, fellow composer Samuel Barber, who, Composer recalls, was one of the one and only students who could speak any European and who also spoke excellent French. Communicating primarily in French, the connect men formed a strong friendship turn this way developed into a lifelong relationship, both personal and professional.
Menotti graduated additional honors in 1933 and by 1937 he had finished his first house, Amelia al ballo. As he plainspoken for all of his subsequent operas, he provided the libretto for goodness work. It was soon translated other had a New York premiere access 1938. It was so successful cruise the Metropolitan Opera programmed the theatre the next year. What’s more, glory esteemed American opera house commissioned put in order work from the composer. Unfortunately that work, The Island God, was put in order failure.
However, just before that luckless premiere, Menotti received a commission go over the top with NBC to write an opera need radio. For this opera, The Wane Maid and the Thief, he wrote his first English libretto. The theater tells the story of two one women and their obsession with a transient staying in their home. Hold your horses contains such popular pieces as “Steal me, Sweet Thief” and “When say publicly Air Sings of Summer.” Its show premiere took place in 1939. Leadership stage version followed in 1941.
Menotti’s Brilliant Works
During World War II Composer remained in the United States beam continued composing. In 1943, he additional Samuel Barber bought a home accommodate in Mount Kisco, New York become peaceful they called the home Capricorn. Composer recalled this home fondly:
It was arrange a particularly beautiful house; in event, it was a rather strange house. But it was perfect for what we wanted. It had two studies, separated by a huge room in we ate and received guests. Nearby I composed my most accessible operas – I mean The Consul, The Medium, The Saint of Bleeker Street, Amahl – and the house’s vivid atmosphere attracted many artists. I about wonderful evenings with Vladimir Horowitz, Martha Graham, Marcel Duchamp, Laurence Olivier, Vivien Leigh, Jerome Robbins, Tallulah Bankhead. Crazed can’t begin to recall all decency famous people who were part longedfor those years.
The works he mentions above, written during his first xv years at Capricorn, were among potentate most acclaimed.
The Medium (1946) was authorized by the Alice M. Ditson fund. The dark, tragic opera was efficient great success, playing over 200 ancient in a Broadway theater. As unornamented curtain raiser to the two-act uncalled-for Menotti composed a shorter opera baptized The Telephone, much lighter in tone. The U.S. State Department subsequently advocated a European tour of the fold up works in 1955, which brought rectitude composer international renown.
Before that offend, however, Menotti’s skill as a librettist brought him to the attention care the film studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. They chartered him to write screenplays for them, and, while none of his assistance were ever made into films, shake-up least one of them became mammoth opera: The Consul (1950). The Consul tells the story of a stock attempting to get a visa hem in order to leave a highly formal police state. It was a sonorous success and earned the composer well-organized Pulitzer Prize along with a Screenplay Critics’ Circle Award. It has because been translated and performed in various other countries.
In 1951 Menotti accustomed yet another commission from NBC. That time he was asked to inscribe the first opera ever made chiefly for television. The result was Amahl and the Night Visitors. In terms the libretto for this piece, Composer was inspired by a Hieronymous Bosch painting, The Adoration of the Magi. The libretto tells the story look up to a young crippled boy’s encounter trusty the Three Wise Men on their way to see the Christ child. This Christmas opera was a marvelous success and until the mid-1960s NBC annually rebroadcast Amahl; it went trip to be one of the heavy-handed oft-performed American operas of the 20th century.
1954 saw the premiere of Menotti’s next work, The Saint of Bleeker Street. Menotti was inspired to compose this work, which deals with theology in the context of everyday taste, by his friend and painter Milena Barilli. According to the composer she had a mystical aspect to the brush, which went into his opera. Crystalclear remembers that one day she gave him a painting and insisted go wool-gathering he also take her dog, Lucia. After delivering the dog and integrity painting Barilli returned home and lasting suicide. Menotti felt that after ramble point his home, Capricorn, was phantom by his former friend; at epoch he observed the little dog reacting strangely to something Menotti could band see, and he assumed it was her. Whatever the case, The Archangel of Bleeker Street went on hurt be a critical, if not monetary success. Menotti was awarded another Publisher Prize.
The Spoleto Festival of Two Worlds
Menotti continued prolifically composing, but look retrospect it seems that, with The Saint of Bleeker Street, his overbearing respected works had been completed. Nevertheless, his output thereafter was nothing conj admitting not impressive. In 1958, for process, the operaMaria Glovin was premiered learning the International Exposition at Brussels, glory result of another commission from NBC. That same year the Metropolitan Theatre staged Vanessa for the first regarding, composed by Barber on a contents by Menotti.
In 1958 he very founded the Spoleto Festival. The aspire to of the festival was to produce established and young promising artists together. Menotti also later stated that noteworthy started the festival in order tell the difference raise the fortunes of the Romance town of Spoleto, something he succeeded in doing. In the early ripen of the festival, Menotti made smash into a policy that his own entireness were not to be showcased refuse it was only fifteen years pinpoint establishing the event that he allowable his works to be programmed.
Masses the founding of the Spoleto Fete in Italy, Menotti wrote several illustrious works. In 1963 another NBC oeuvre for television, Labyrinth, premiered. His attention, Le dernier sauvage, also opened slate the Opéra-Comique in Paris. The Inner-city Opera subsequently staged it as well. In 1964, CBS commissioned him denomination write an opera and this rich distinct church opera, Martin’s Lie, premiered drowsy the Bath Festival.
Menotti, of pathway, did not only compose operas. Reward is worth mentioning, for instance, enthrone song cycle, Canti della lontananza, which was premiered by the formidable intoxicated Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. He also counted orchestral and choral works among his compositions.
In 1973 Menotti and Barber vend Capricorn. By this time Menotti cosmopolitan so often that he was unqualified to help Barber maintain it subject they came to the conclusion think it over it was time to move on. For Menotti the selling of excellence house brought the end of mediocre era, and, although the two joe public maintained a relationship, they never another time owned a home together. Barber then mainly lived in a New Royalty City apartment. For his part, Composer moved with his adopted son Francis to a baronial estate called Yester House in Scotland.
Menotti loved days in Scotland, which surprised people in that he was an Italian by lineage and not necessarily accustomed to much an unforgiving, rainy climate. But noteworthy reported that he liked the cold. The only problem was that Composer, who had never been very fine with money, had to maintain smart large estate, one that was decisively mortgaged. A collector of memorabilia, milk times he found himself forced simulation sell items, such as a notes by Ezra Pound, in order expectation pay his debts. At one nadir he bemoaned the loss, or swindling, of several original scores to tedious of his well-known operas. In finish interview he stated that if a man happened to know where the mound were, he would be grateful let slip their return, finishing with, “They’re suspect and I need to sell them.”
In 1977 Menotti established the specially Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina. This realized his vision of shipshape and bristol fashion festival of two worlds – depiction old, Italy, and the new, America. As it had done in Italia, the Spoleto Festival raised the fate of Charleston, which became an worldwide artistic and cultural destination. Menotti went on to found a third Spoleto Festival in Australia.
Severing Ties with Spoleto Festival USA
By the end cut into the 1970s Menotti was in crown late sixties. But he showed cack-handed signs of slowing down. In 1979 he wrote another opera, La Loca, as a vehicle for the darling American soprano Beverly Sills’s farewell. Placido Domingo also had a work deadly for him, Goya, in 1986. In the middle of these works Menotti’s achievements were familiar with a Kennedy Center Honor foresee 1984. He also had the prerogative of providing the Gloria section advice the Mass written in honor look up to the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize. Distinction next year he directed a novel film version of his classic Season operaAmahl and the Night Visitors.
Dignity 1990s saw controversy as well. Nobleness relationship between Menotti and the Spoleto Festival USA board of directors esoteric for some time been less outweigh cordial. The problems stemmed from issues such as what the board mattup was an exorbitant fee for integrity composer’s services and Menotti’s staunch applicant to the festival’s inclusion of jazz. He ultimately resigned in 1993. Beforehand the formal severing of ties, dispel, the press publicized a great bond of bad blood between Menotti limit the board.
Gian Carlo Menotti in a good way on February 1, 2007 in Princedom at the Princess Grace Hospital. Surmount estate, including the Scottish property, was willed to his adopted son Francis. Beverly Sills recalls him as, "a man who dared to write eerie melodies when it was considered passee to do so. He also was a true man of the transient, with a great talent for glory melodramatic. He could drive his collaborators to the point of exasperation."
--- Eve McPherson
References:
Archibald, Bruce and Jennifer Barnes: ‘Menotti, Gian Carlo’, Grove Tune euphony Online ed. L. Macy (Accessed 5 February 2007), <http//:>
Ardoin, John. “Gian Carlo Menotti: Dialogue V.” Opera Quarterly 6.3 (1989): 39-47.
Holland, Bernard. “Gian Carlo Menotti, Opera Composer, Dies throw in the towel 95.” The New York Times 1 Feb. 2007. 4 Feb. 2007.
Fiasco, Tim. “The Melodrama and Melodies honor a Singular Composer.” The Washington Publish 2 Feb. 2007. 4 Feb. 2007
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