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The sun is buried and the stars weep
Gian Carlo Menotti has died.
He wrote some of the strangest and eeriest music I have ever heard or sung. Steal me, sweet thief, for time's flight is stealing my youth. Yes, I know a child the color of earth, the color of thorn. If you're not shy, pin up my hair with your star and buckle my shoe. Horizons! Horizons! There's no guard to kiss or kill. Death's frontiers are free. "The Black Swan" was my standard audition aria for years, a murder ballad with a drowned lover and a bloodied sun and a sleepless, weed-mouthed ghost. Its source opera, The Medium (1946), is a shivery film noir in which the boundaries between childish pantomime and bereaved, believing grief and a charlatan's drunken delusions all blur together into the brush of a cold hand in the dark; The Consul (1950) is a Kafkaesque fever dream of a bureacracy, where a husband can disappear into a paper trail without a trace and the same hopeless figures have inhabited the waiting room for years and even a magician can produce anything out of his pockets—doves, cards, flowers—but the papers he needs to escape. The Old Maid and the Thief (1941) is a self-described "grotesque opera," in which rich old women and ambitious young ones project onto an unassuming traveler every guise from a dashing convict to a kept lover to a stand-in for Death, and Amahl and the Night Visitors (1951) is a miracle play, the night the Three Magi stopped by the home of a lame beggar-child and his mother, following their star toward the east. These aren't even all Menotti's operas, only the ones I know best: and there will be no more. But I am glad of them.
Choose your partner! The dance is on!
He wrote some of the strangest and eeriest music I have ever heard or sung. Steal me, sweet thief, for time's flight is stealing my youth. Yes, I know a child the color of earth, the color of thorn. If you're not shy, pin up my hair with your star and buckle my shoe. Horizons! Horizons! There's no guard to kiss or kill. Death's frontiers are free. "The Black Swan" was my standard audition aria for years, a murder ballad with a drowned lover and a bloodied sun and a sleepless, weed-mouthed ghost. Its source opera, The Medium (1946), is a shivery film noir in which the boundaries between childish pantomime and bereaved, believing grief and a charlatan's drunken delusions all blur together into the brush of a cold hand in the dark; The Consul (1950) is a Kafkaesque fever dream of a bureacracy, where a husband can disappear into a paper trail without a trace and the same hopeless figures have inhabited the waiting room for years and even a magician can produce anything out of his pockets—doves, cards, flowers—but the papers he needs to escape. The Old Maid and the Thief (1941) is a self-described "grotesque opera," in which rich old women and ambitious young ones project onto an unassuming traveler every guise from a dashing convict to a kept lover to a stand-in for Death, and Amahl and the Night Visitors (1951) is a miracle play, the night the Three Magi stopped by the home of a lame beggar-child and his mother, following their star toward the east. These aren't even all Menotti's operas, only the ones I know best: and there will be no more. But I am glad of them.
Choose your partner! The dance is on!
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I heard you sing "The Black Swan" once; it was beautiful and part of you, as if your blood accompanied.
Nine
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Thank you. It is a song that matters to me.
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Heh. Maybe there'll be a revival.
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At the least it means that some scholarship that couldn't happen during the lifetime can now go forward, unless the surviving family/estate is going to hold a crackdown.
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What else are you thinking of? I think Les contes d'Hoffmann is often performed that way—I have two different recordings with two different endings and orders for the acts, and I imagine there are many more out there.
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Of course, this should be undertaken carefully and with critical edition awareness, so that you always know what you're doing and where it comes from.
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I'd known he was alive only because I kept checking every few years and each time was faintly amazed he was still around. (Christopher Fry was the one who took me by surprise: when he died in 2005, I thought he'd been dead since the '70's.) At 95, he did have an excuse for dying, but I will still miss him.
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It can be done.
"The sun has fallen and it lies in blood (The Black Swan)" as performed by Anna Maria Alberghetti (Monica), 1951 film cast.
"Bravo! And after the theatre, supper and dance! (Monica's Waltz)" ditto, ditto.
"Afraid, am I afraid?" as performed by Marie Powers (Baba), same cast.
I don't yet have a good recording of The Consul, but it's on my list of music to find.
Nosy flister
I am not familiar with Menotti rep, but my sister sang Mrs. Todd (Old Maid and the Thief) once for a small production.
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I am now a year and a half out of formal practice for health reasons, which is the longest I have ever gone without serious singing in my life since I started lessons at twelve, but I am a soprano with a performable G above high C. My training is classical, but all the performances I've ever been paid for were folk music. My first year in grad school, however, I was in the Yale School of Music's production of Puccini's Suor Angelica, and that made me intensely happy.
I am not familiar with Menotti rep, but my sister sang Mrs. Todd (Old Maid and the Thief) once for a small production.
That's wonderful. Of his operas I'm familiar with, The Medium and The Consul are probably my favorites.
Do you sing?
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My sister is a professional opera singer (mezzo) on the east coast, still working towards her big break. She's been involved in opera since 1996. At first I became acclimated to opera but then fell in love (we had no classical encouragement in our upbringing). I travel to see her shows when I can, and have season tix at Seattle. Last I saw her at the Kennedy Center May 2006 singing for Lorin Maazel and his Chateauxville Foundation's Turn of the Screw - one of my all-time favorite operas! (I adore Britten!)
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That's awesome. In your genes?
My sister is a professional opera singer (mezzo) on the east coast, still working towards her big break. She's been involved in opera since 1996.
May I ask her name?
(I adore Britten!)
Hear, hear! Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears.
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My sister is on the web at www.michelle-rice dot com
Yes, Britten and Pears - quite the dynamic duo! I would love to hear his recordings of Peter Quint, one of the creepiest tenors in all of opera!
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You should definitely find a banjo player (or learn to play the banjo: though I say this as someone who plays no instruments beyond enough piano to pick out melodic lines and I can get maybe three chords out of a harp). That's the kind of music that should be handed on.
My sister is on the web at www.michelle-rice dot com
I'm on the wrong part of the east coast to have seen her in performance, I think, but I wanted to make sure.
Yes, Britten and Pears - quite the dynamic duo! I would love to hear his recordings of Peter Quint, one of the creepiest tenors in all of opera!
Unfortunately, all I can offer you is Peter Grimes. (Although if you want to go outside Britten, I do have Pears' Winterreise: it remains my favorite version of the cycle. He sounds like some weird wintry instrument himself; already a stranger, turning away into silence and cold.) I need more recordings of Pears and Britten in my life.
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My sis mostly sings in the DC area and frequently in Cleveland. Striving towards other, bigger venues, etc. (I think of DC as the east coast simply because it takes me all day to get there! but perhaps it is not very accurate geographical shorthand.)
Do you attend much opera in or around Atlanta, and if yes, do you have recommendations on companies not to miss?
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You're welcome. I think he's phenomenal.
"Willst zu meinen Liedern deine Leier dreh'n . . . ?"
Do you attend much opera in or around Atlanta, and if yes, do you have recommendations on companies not to miss?
I'm currently in Boston, actually: where I do attend operas, particularly Opera Boston (where I saw an excellent production of The Consul last year). I was better placed when I was in New Haven and the Met was only an hour and a half away on the train, but I'll make do for now.
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It's on the list.
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Does it trouble you (personally) not to sing, or is it a nice change not to sing?
And a performable g -!!- that's up there!
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I mind it intensely. Singing has always been one of the things around which my life centers. (There's a story that when I was two years old in the back seat of the car, my grandmother was trying to teach my mother a song as they drove somewhere, and I picked it up instead.) By default, I chose academics over music when I went to grad school, but I need to start again soon or I won't have a voice worth speaking of.
And a performable g -!!- that's up there!
Heh. Thanks. When I'm in good health and voice . . .