strong but fragile survivors
by Douglas Messerli
Gian-Carlo Menotti The Medium / Thomas
Schippers conducting the Symphony Orchestra of
Rome
Radio Italiana, 1950
Gian-Carlo Menotti The Medium Peter Morin (director) / Raffi
Armenian conducting The Straford
Ensemble / 1977 [TV production based on the Comus Music Theatre of Canada
Production]
Gian-Carlo Menotti The Consul / Werner
Torkanowsky conducting / Produced for television by
Jean
Darlymple, 1960
Gian-Carlo Menotti Amahl and the Night Visitors / NBC Theatre [Hallmark Hall of Fame production]
1951-1962
With Gian-Carlo Menotti’s death on February 1, 2007,
the US lost one of its major composers of opera. Even though he had remained
throughout his life an Italian citizen, living for the past several years in
Monaco and Scotland, Menotti composed and performed his major operas in the US,
where he lived for most of his life, companion for years with the composer
Samuel Barber and, later, with conductor Thomas Schippers.
I
remember Menotti—as many of my generation might—for his Amahl and the Night Visitors, his so-called Christmas opera,
performed annually from 1951 for a number of years on NBC television. The
simple story of a poor young shepherd boy’s and his mother’s encounter with the
Three Kings, the biblical wise men on their way to witness the birth of the
Holy Child, was perhaps my first encounter with opera, a kind of treasured
annual event in my house—although my other family members, I am sure, would not
have suffered it if I’d not pleaded each year for that special 45 minutes of
viewing.
I’d also
seen—although I can’t remember where (perhaps on stage at Waukesha, Wisconsin
High School)—a performance of his short L’amour
á trois, The Telephone, wherein a young woman, Lucy, is so infatuated with
her phone that her lover, Ben cannot hold her attention long enough to propose
marriage. His final solution is to telephone with his proposal.
If the
two works I’ve described sound somewhat simplistic and—here comes that terrible
word—“popular,” Menotti’s works were just that! Despite my family’s disinterest
in Amahl, millions of households did
watch it, presumably with great pleasure, annually—at a time when television
executives were still testing out various cultural activities (drama,
historical reenactments, orchestral music, and opera) on the relatively new medium.
Menotti’s
other operas, moreover, The Medium
(1946), The Consul (1950), and The Saint of Bleecker Street (1954),
were all performed on Broadway—the first with a run at the Ethel Barrymore
Theater in 1947-1948 of 211 performances; the second running eight months and
winning the Pulitzer Prize and Drama Critics’ Circle Award; and the third,
performed at the Broadway Theater (although with less success), also awarded
the Drama Critics’ Circle Award, a second Pulitzer Prize and the New York Music
Critics’ Circle Award. Menotti, in short, was popular. Through his highly
dramatic plots and appealing, melodic music (the composer is often compared to
Puccini), Menotti was able to bring together music, theater, and popular
entertainment in a way that is nearly inconceivable today! As music critic
Martin Bernheimer described Menotti, he is “a modern composer who writes
old-fashioned opera for the masses.”
One
might, contrarily, describe Menotti—along with Leonard Bernstein and a few
others—as an innovative composer in his attempts to blend popular theater with
a so-called “high” art, a composer who would influence later figures such as
Arnold Weinstein (whom I’ve written about in my 2003 volume of these cultural
memoirs), Irene Maria Fornes, Stephen Sondheim, Mac Wellman (in works such as The Lesser Magoo) and even me—in my own
operatic endeavor with composer Michael Kowalski, Still in Love!
By the
end of his career, however—a career perhaps also shortened by his
entrepreneurial activities of the Festival of Two Worlds occurring in both
Spoleto, Italy and Charleston, South Carolina—Menotti’s melodically based
theater pieces were critically attacked. While his libretto for Samuel Barber’s
Vanessa was praised, his own later
works—as well as those of Barber—were often scathingly dismissed. Times had
changed.
The
critics, in some respects, may be justified for their reactions. There is no
question that Menotti’s art is often retardataire;
that the high drama of his pieces can appear almost comical to today’s more
cynical audiences. Although Menotti’s lyrical works are often as discordant as
Bernstein’s, for example, he does not share that composer’s jazz idioms, so
brilliantly played out in On the Town
and West Side Story. Yet, there are
many moments in Menotti’s work that are far more musically challenging than
Sondheim’s compositions and match Bernstein’s inventiveness: the overture to
Bernstein’s 1955 “comic opera” Candide echoes
many elements of Menotti’s earlier “Dance” of Amahl and the Night Visitors, and Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti shares many chordal moments with Menotti’s early
works.
Menotti’s
first major opera, The Medium (composed
after a short one-act opera buffa, Amelia
Goes to the Ball; another television work, The Old Maid and the Thief, and a failed opera seria, The Island God), seems to have been
created in a hot-house environment. The very plot of the opera is, at times,
absurd. Madame Flora is a medium who, with help of her daughter Monica and a
mute, gypsy, servant boy, Toby, defrauds her customers—a couple, the Gobineaus,
who are desperate to contact their baby boy, drowned in a decorative lawn
fountain, and Mrs. Nolan, come to hear news of her more recently deceased
daughter—in order to eke out a meager living. Meanwhile, Monica and Toby,
innocently toying with one another during Madame Flora’s absences and drinking
binges, have fallen in love.
Madame
Flora arrives home (she has threatened a neighbor lady to force her to repay a
loan by sitting on her doorstep for hours) to find that nothing is prepared for
the evening’s séance. She threatens both children, particularly Toby, whom she
found on the streets of Budapest. The séance is successfully performed with
Monica’s lovely interpretation of the two children (“Mother, Mother, are you
there?) and Toby’s technical support with the lights and table risings. Near
the end of the event, however, Madame feels a touch against her throat, and
becomes horrified, demanding the participants depart. She is certain that Toby
has somehow been involved in the event, and insistently questions him, later
even whipping him as he cowers in fear; yet he cannot (or, Madame Flora is
convinced, will not) answer her
questions.
Frightened by his silence and her own doubts, she determines to end the
séances and return the money to the Gobineaus and Mrs. Nolan. A week later,
however, they show up at the usual time, pleading that she continue the
séances. Still affected by the previous week’s events, Madame rejects their
pleas, explaining to her former customers just how she has tricked them.
Incredibly, they refuse to believe her, insisting that the voices they heard
were real, that she must have powers even she does not comprehend. Perceiving
them as gullible idiots, she demands they leave her house, soon after requiring
the same of Toby. Monica pleads that he is incapable of caring for himself,
that he will die on the streets, but Madame Flora is determined to put her
fears to rest. She locks Monica in her room and sends the boy off, settling
down to drink and ruminate why she, a woman who has seen the worst of war-time
events, should now be so frightened by death.
Toby
sneaks back into the house to free Monica and take her away with him. Startled
from her drunkenness, the medium reaches for her gun, shooting into the dark:
Toby is dead.
Such
grand, histrionic events need to be performed and directed in a similar manner
if the opera is to succeed. I purchased two DVD’s of The Medium, the first a televised production from 1977 by The
Stratford Ensemble with Maureen Forrester as Madame Flora and Shawna Farrell as
Monica. This was a toned-down production, Forrester speaking many of her lines,
some scenes pared away, the set starkly barren. I found the production
enjoyable—but somewhat unconvincing. The second production—the earlier 1951 Menotti-directed
film with Thomas Schippers conducting the Symphony Orchestra of Rome Radio
Italiana and Marie Powers and Anna Maria Alberghetti in the major roles—was
wonderfully over-the-top and cinematically conceived. As the reviewer for the Time Out Film Guide expressed it: “With
monstrous characters and images only conceivable in a fevered or operatic mind
(where else would one find Toby the deaf mute gypsy boy, his defiant eyelids
sealed with hot candle wax), yet fully realizable nowhere else but the cinema.”
The 1960
Jean Dalrymple-produced television production of Menotti’s The Consul was presented in the drab, gritty black-and-white of
early TV. But Patricia Neway’s performance of Magda Sorel captured the slightly
mad actions of a woman psychologically on the edge. Her husband, after all, is
an underground hero, forced in the very first scene of the opera to leave his
home—to cross the frontier—so that he will not betray his compatriots. Their
baby son, watched over by the husband’s aged mother, is slowly starving to
death.
This
couple’s sorrowful duet of departure, transformed by the mother’s participation
into a trio, is centered upon what are perhaps some of the looniest lyrics ever
created:
Now, O lips, say goodbye
The word must be said but the heart must not heed.
….
The rose holds summer in her winter sleep.
The sea gathers moonlight where ships cannot plough.
And so will the heart retain endless hope…
…where time does not count, where words cannot reach.
Let no tears, no love laden tears dim the light that charts
our way.
Leave the tears to the starless one who wanders without
compass in the night.
Despite being nearly drowned in metaphors, the
audience recognizes that this is the language of believers, of the heroes Sorel
and his wife represent. John’s only practical advice to Magda is to visit the
Consul.
We never
discover what Consul she is to visit, in what country the police are
terrorizing her, or to where she and her husband are trying to escape. And, in
that sense, there is a sort of Ionescoian abstraction to Menotti’s opera. It is
a no-man’s land and an everyman’s land simultaneously—it might represent any
European city before World War II and
any dictatorially run country after
the war. Whereas John and Magda sing in a metaphorically based, dream-like
language, the secretary of the Consul intones a bureaucratic gobbledygook. “May
I speak to the Consul” Magda pleads again and again, only to be answered, “No
one’s allowed to speak to the Consul, the Consul is busy.”
Asked
what she wants, Magda tries to explain her husband’s role as hero and leader of
the underground, to explain her own suffering, relate her child’s and
mother-in-law’s deaths, and warn that her every move is watched. For the
secretary, however, there is nothing to be done; forms must be filled out. The
hilarious, repetitively rhythmic interchange between the Consul Secretary and
Magda is reminiscent of both Ionesco and Beckett:
Secretary: Your name is a number.
Magda: My name is Sorel.
Secretary: Sorel is a name and a name is a number.
Magda: The hidden hunger waits for the heart-sick panther to return.
Secretary: I give you these papers. This is how to begin.
Your name
is a number
Your
story’s a case
You need a
request
Your hopes will be filed
Come back
next week.
Magda: Will you explain [to the Consul]?
Secretary: What is there to explain?
Magda: Explain that John is a hero. That flowers bloom in the blood
that was shed.
The
secretary can only repeat the requirements: "Fill out the papers, Your
name is a number,” etc. Like others visiting the Consul day after day, Magda
makes no progress in communicating her plight. After so insistently demanding
to see the Consul that the Secretary caves in, Magda is met at the door by his
previous visitor: the chief of police who threatens her life. She collapses,
returning to the Consul the next day without any hope of response, then returning
home to kill herself at the very moment that her husband has himself returned
to help his family escape.
In this
opera the melodic references to Puccini (“Now, O lips, say goodbye) are darkly
comedic in their relation to the Consul office interchanges, and, accordingly,
the music seems much more dissonant and fragmented than the former opera. It is
almost as if in The Consul Menotti
has found the perfect foil for his melodramatic and sometimes overly sweet
melodic moments. Without diminishing any of the true tragedy of his tale,
Menotti also elicits a sense of the absurdity and meaningless of all acts.
Having seen Amahl and the Night Visitors two or three times in recent years, I
was satisfied to listen to a recording of that opera. The Royal Opera House at
Convent Garden production with Lorna Haywood as the Mother and James Rainbird
as the young crippled boy was a beautiful reminder of the joys of this true
family event. Here too, particularly in his presentation of the slightly
ridiculous King Kasper, Menotti was able to combine the absurd and the sublime.
How could anyone with a shred of humor not be enchanted by King Kasper's
fascinating catalogue of the contents of his marvelous box in “This Is My Box,”
or the repeatedly chanted elisions of the wise men in “Thank You Good Friends”
in response to the gifts brought them by the poor shepherds. The beautiful
antiphony of “Have You Seen a Child?"—the wise men asking about the Christ
child, Amahl’s mother responding with the news of her own son—marvelously
personalizes the mythical and helps to explain her later attempt to steal the
Kings’ gold. Only Menotti, moreover, could have conjured up the wonderfully
absurd idea of presenting to the Christ child a gift of a crutch—reminding us
all perhaps of how impossible it is to stand on two feet as a human being.
If
Menotti was an unabashed romantic, so too was he a kind of early absurdist, a
theatrical trickster who could combine the tragic occurrences of the 20th century
with a comic recognition of the spiritual emptiness with which those events had
left its survivors. Madame Flora, Magda Sorel, even the abandoned Mother of the
small crippled child, all inordinately strong figures, are brought down by
nearly insignificant events and individuals—by a touch of the flesh, by an
office worker demanding that human beings become a number, by three wandering
kings mysteriously passing in the night who sweep up a mother's child from
bleak reality into a myth of eternal proportions.
American
culture has indeed lost something with the death of a man who could speak so
eloquently—in both music and language—of the fragility of life.
Los Angeles, March 10, 2007
Reprinted from The
Green Integer Review, No. 8 (April 2007)
Before writing on the early Menotti production of his The Medium, I had not heard the
Anna Maria Alberghetti performance.
As a young teenager, I knew her only for her role in the Broadway musical Carnival,
listening to the recording of that
musical—in particular, her rendition of the song “Mira”— so many times that
today it can hardly be heard, the music appearing as a faint background
accompaniment to a series of cracks, hisses, and scratch sounds—the record
itself becoming a sort of “strong but fragile survivor.” Several years ago, I
was introduced to Anna Maria Alberghetti at an art opening at the Los Angeles
County Museum, and was able to tell her in person how much her performances had
meant to me.
Los Angeles, March 11, 2007
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