MODERNISTS REJECT BEAUTY PRECISELY BECAUSE IT IS UNIVERSALLY ACCESSIBLE:

The Melodrama And Melodies Of a Singular Composer (Tim Page, February 2, 2007, Washington Post)

Gian Carlo Menotti, who died yesterday at the age of 95, was a riot of contradictions -- a supremely gifted composer who also wrote some of the tawdriest music in the literature; a charming and brilliantly innovative impresario who ended up estranged from all three of the arts festivals he founded on as many continents; a man who once created operas for Broadway and network television, and whose work is now virtually unknown among a younger generation of musicians.

Menotti saw himself as the last in a great line. "I am a neo-Platonist, I suppose," he told me in 1991. "I believe there is a Platonic ideal of beauty, and artists are given a fleeting vision of that beauty. The rest is a process of remembering. You try to catch the beauty you've seen, and it is a torture, because you can never quite do it."

Still, at the height of his career -- the middle decades of the 20th century -- Menotti was generally considered the most successful American opera composer in our history. "The Consul" (1950) ran on Broadway for 269 performances, won a Drama Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for composition. It remains a harrowing study of totalitarianism -- genuine opera that is also gripping theater by any standards.

"Amahl and the Night Visitors" (1951), a 50-minute television opera about a crippled boy who offers up his crutches to the Three Wise Men as a gift for the infant Jesus and is instantly cured, was a hallowed Christmas tradition on NBC from the time of its premiere until the mid-1960s. Menotti won a second Pulitzer for "The Saint of Bleecker Street" in 1955 and shared in yet a third when he fashioned the libretto for his longtime lover Samuel Barber's "Vanessa" in 1958.

Gian Carlo Menotti, Opera Composer, Dies at 95 (BERNARD HOLLAND, 2/01/07, NY Times)

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 600 times, often by amateur companies and on high school stages, since it was created for television in 1951.

Gian Carlo Menotti (Daily Telegraph, 02/02/2007)

Gian Carlo Menotti, the composer, conductor, pianist and librettist who died in Monaco yesterday aged 97, achieved remarkable success in adapting the traditional qualities of Italian opera, as exemplified by Puccini and the verismo composers, to the requirements of the American stage and of radio and television.

He once remarked: "The Italians are very unmusical. If I go to a Protestant church in London or Amsterdam or listen to a black choir, I hear four-part harmony. Italians could never do that. In Italy we all have to sing the melody because we cannot harmonise."

Although his music was regarded by many critics as too eclectic and derivative, as well as too accessible, to merit serious consideration, the public responded eagerly to such works as The Medium, The Telephone and particularly The Consul.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 2, 2007 10:54 AM