Menotti, Cultural Giant, Dies at 95

MELISSA BLOCK, host:

The man who wrote the first operas for broadcast has died. Gian Carlo Menotti was 95 years old. He died in a hospital in Monaco.

NPR's Nova Safo has this remembrance.

NOVA SAFO: Gian Carlo Menotti won two Pulitzers for music. An Italian immigrant to the U.S., he was credited with reinvigorating American opera by bringing it to the masses. He wrote the first opera for radio, entitled "The Old Maid and the Thief." But his best-known work is a 45-minute opera for television.

(Soundbite of opera, "Amahl and the Night Visitors")

Unidentified Man: (Singing) (Unintelligible)

SAVO: "Amahl and the Night Visitors" premiered on Christmas Eve 1951. It's about an impoverished widow and her young crippled son. They're visited by three kings on their way to greet the Christ child.

(Soundbite of opera, "Amahl and the Night Visitors")

Unidentified Woman: (Singing) (Unintelligible)

SAFO: In the opera, the widow's son is miraculously healed when he offers to take his crutch to the Christ child as a gift. For years, "Amahl and the Night Visitors" was shown on TV at Christmastime, and it's still performed on stage year after year.

But even though "Amahl" is what is Menotti is most remembered for, it's not the opera that made him famous. That honor falls to "The Medium," the story of a woman who holds fake séances. Menotti directed this film version in 1950.

(Sounbite of movie, "The Medium")

Ms. MARIE POWERS (Actress): (As Madame Flora) (Singing) Is there some dear departed you want to speak to?

Unidentified Man: (Singing) Yes, my daughter, Doodley.

Ms. POWERS: (Singing) Oh, when did she die?

Unidentified Man: (Singing) Last year. She was only 16.

SAFO: This scene from "The Medium" contains one of the elements that made Gian Carlo Menotti's works popular - sung dialogue. Menotti biographer John Gruen says this kind of half-singing, half-speaking was employed by earlier composers. But it was Menotti who mastered its use in modern music.

Mr. JOHN GRUEN (Biographer): It was a real innovation in that it gave the audience a quicker way to understand what is going on onstage.

SAFO: Menotti took "The Medium" to Broadway and got rave reviews. The opera won a Pulitzer Prize, as did "The Consul," which followed it. "The Medium's" supernatural plot was inspired by a real life séance Menotti attended, in which a woman tried to reach her dead child. The experience moved Menotti to think about spirituality and the nature of belief. And those themes are prevalent in his works. Menotti talked about his personal spiritual views in a 2001 NPR interview.

Mr. GIAN CARLO MENOTTI (Italian Composer): People ask me whether I'm religious. Well, in a certain way, I am. First of all, you know, when I was a child, I was lame. And when I was about two years old, and my nanny took me to a church in Northern Italy, where there was a miraculous Madonna. And I was blessed, and I walked. And the memory of that is what inspired later on "Amahl and the Night Visitors."

SAFO: With "Amahl" and his Pulitzer Prize-winning works, Menotti achieved a level of celebrity unexpected by classical composers, let alone opera composers.

Ned Rorem briefly studied with Gian Carlo Menotti and is himself a celebrated composer of song.

Mr. NED ROREM (Composer): For every composer in America, and in by extension, the world, said if he can hit the jackpot, so can I. But nobody made the grade the way he did.

SAFO: Some in the classical music world considered Menotti's operas trivial because of their popularity, saying the works weren't intellectual enough. But Menotti countered that he'd rather his works be musical than intellectual.

Besides composing, Menotti was also a stage director and he created the Spoleto Festival of the Two Worlds with the aim of bringing American and European artists together.

Gian Carlo Menotti embodied that combination of two worlds as an Italian immigrant who profoundly influenced America's musical history.

Nova Safo, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.