Pat Pearce thinks composer Gian Carlo Menotti has received a bad rap, and more and more people in the opera world are beginning to agree with him.
After embracing the talented novice and setting his career on a meteoric rise in the 1930s, the opera world eventually soured on Menotti, because his tuneful writing came to be seen as old- fashioned as the grip of the avant- garde took hold.
“He and many of his contemporaries suffered this same fate if they wrote anything that was halfway singable,” said Pearce, Central City Opera’s general and artistic director.
But with the music world’s liberation from the dominance of the rigid atonalists, and Menotti’s death in February at age 95, a re-evaluation of the composer’s legacy and a renaissance of his works seems all but inevitable.
Central City Opera seeks to ignite that process Saturday evening, when it opens its first production of “The Saint of Bleecker Street” (1954), part of a trio of post-World War II operas that most experts consider to be the best of Menotti’s two dozen or so stage works.
“I personally think it’s his greatest piece, and I’m just shocked that it’s hardly ever performed,” said famed soprano Catherine Malfitano, who performed its lead role in several 1970s productions and is stage director for this version.
Although Menotti remained an Italian citizen all his life, he spent much of his time in the United States and is said to have referred to himself as Italian-American. He completed his studies at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadlephia and later founded the second of his two Spoleto Festivals in Charleston, S.C.
In 1937 at age 25, he wrote his first opera, a one-act piece titled “Amelia al Ballo.” It debuted at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia, and within a year it was on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera with a glowing review from The New York Times. Menotti had arrived.
According to Barry Singer, who penned an article on Menotti in the July issue of Opera News, the composer was everything cash-starved opera companies in the Depression were looking for. His work had an appealing air of modernity about it while still hewing to the crowd-pleasing traditions of Giacomo Puccini.
“Menotti … went on from ‘Amelia al Ballo’ to become America’s most prolific, widely performed and widely disdained composer,” Singer writes.
But that disdain, if that is the right word, did not come until later. His 1946 opera, “The Medium,” was so popular that it shifted to Broadway, running for 211 performances. His next two, “The Consul” (1950) and “Bleecker Street,” were created specifically for Broadway, and each won Menotti a Pulitzer Prize.
Malfitano had her first contact with Menotti a year after her 1972 debut at the Central City Opera. She appeared in the title role of Annina in a production of “Bleecker Street” at the Wolf Trap Opera, a summer company near Washington, D.C.
Annina is an orphaned girl in New York’s Littly Italy who has religious visions and performs miracles. Her brother, Michele, attempts to protect her from exploitation but is soon thwarted.
Rudel saw Malfitano’s performance and quickly engaged her for the New York City Opera, later casting her in the same role in the company’s 1976 and 1978 productions of “Bleecker Street” – the latter being broadcast on television.
Pearce was long unconvinced that the opera could be staged in a meaningful way. When Malfitano directed Central City’s production of “Madama Butterfly” in 2005, she mentioned “Bleecker Street” to him as a possible offering and supplied a DVD of her 1978 production.
Still skeptical, Pearce planned to watch just a few minutes of it but found himself riveted, not able to turn it off until the opera was over. He became an instant convert and began looking for a slot for the work on Central City’s schedule.
In addition to the sheer beauty of Menotti’s melodies, a key ingredient in his operas is their theatricality. He had a knack for incorporating unexpected, often timely subject matter, drawing on 1950s Cold War fears, for example, in “The Consul.”
Like great opera composers from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to Benjamin Britten, he understood both the possibilities and the limitations of the theater. He even served as director for many productions of his works, so he could get exactly the effect he wanted.
“I think his greatest contribution to American opera is his affinity for drama and his ability to link his music with the drama in such a way that they become inseparable,” Malfitano said. “And since he was so often his own librettist, we can appreciate that he was as much interested in the dramatic gesture as he was in the musical gesture.”
Another key to Menotti’s success was his constant eye on accessibility. In a bid to create a work that anyone could enjoy, he wrote a one-act Christmas opera for NBC television in 1951 that has become a classic – “Amahl and the Night Visitors.”
The piece, which is particularly popular with amateur and student performers, continues to be one of the most performed operas in the country, with hundreds of productions each year by groups of all kinds.
Famed conductor Julius Rudel, who led the New York City Opera from 1957 through 1979 and commissioned Menotti’s 1971 opera, “The Most Important Man,” said the always-practical composer had knack for finding ways to get his operas heard by as many people as possible.
“Some of the things we wrote, which were first done on Broadway, show that,” Rudel said. “He was aware of what was going on and found his way through the jungle of various styles and attempts at a 20th-century statement in opera.”
But by the 1960s, Menotti’s popularity began to fade as tastes changed and serialism and other vanguard compositional approaches claimed a virtual monopoly on the classical world, one that did begin to lift until the 1980s.
“During the latter decades of he last century, the scorn of Menotti’s detractors overtook the composer’s ubiquitous popular appeal, ‘Amahl’ aside,” Singer writes. “Menotti operas are today infrequently performed, except at the collegiate and amateur levels.”
But in the aftermath of Menotti’s death the time is ripe for a re-examination and revival of the composer’s operas, including those that have languished in virtual obscurity. At a time when opera companies are once again hungry for repertoire offering a modern sensibility yet easy accessibility, Menotti might be just the answer. Again.
Fine arts critic Kyle MacMillan can be reached at 303-954-1675 or kmacmillan@denverpost.com.
“The Saint of Bleecker Street”
OPERA | Composed by Gian Carlo Menotti, Central City Opera House, 124 Eureka St.; 8 p.m. Saturday, with nine other performances through Aug. 18 | $43-$87 | 303-292-6700 or 800-851-8175 or .
