This year would have been the 100th birthday of Gian Carlo Menotti, an American composer, librettist and teacher of Italian descent.
He was the sixth of eight children born to Alfonso (a coffee merchant) and Ines Menotti. When he was four years old he began to compose songs an activity his mother encouraged. At the age of eleven he composed his first opera, The Death of Pierrot, writing both the music and libretto. In 1923 he began his formal musical training at the Milan Conservatory.
When his father died, his mother went to Columbia in an attempt to save his father's coffee business, she took Gian Carlo with her and enrolled him at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia in 1928. He brought with him a letter of introduction from Arturo Toscanini's wife. While there he studied composition under Natale Rosario Scalero. Among his fellow students were Leonard Bernstein and Samuel Barber, who would later become his partner in both life and work. After graduation, Samuel and Gian Carlo bought a house in Mount Kisco, New York, which they named "Capricorn." They lived there for nearly forty years.
While at Curtis, Gian Carlo composed his first mature opera, Amelia al Ballo (Amelia Goes to the Ball) with his own libretto. It is one of three operas he composed to an Italian text, all his other operas have an English libretto, the other two being Ilo e Zeus (The Island God) composed in 1942 and L'ultimo selvaggio (The Last Savage) composed in 1963. Reportedly he destroyed all copies of the score for Ilo e Zeus and had even refused a revival request. L'ultimo selvaggio received it's premier at the Opéra-Comique in Paris, where it was ridiculed by French music critics. It was revived in 1981 and again more recently in 2011 by the Santa Fe Opera where critics gave the work positive reviews and even called for a reexamination of the work. Like Wagner before him, in addition to writing all the libretti for his operas, he directed most productions as well. His most successful works were written in the 1940's and 50's. In addition to writing his own libretti, he wrote the libretti for Barber's operas Vanessa and A Hand of Bridge as well as revising the libretto for Anthony and Cleopatra.
In 1958, he founded the Festival dei Due Mondi (Festival of Two Worlds) annual Summer music festival held in Spoleto, Italy. His intention was to have the two worlds of American and European culture facing each other in the event. Nearly twenty years later he would found The Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, South Carolina. A third festival in Melbourne, Australia but after only three festivals Gian Carlo withdrew and took the naming rights with him, since 1990 this festival has been known as the Melbourne International Arts Festival.
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