The sun is buried and the stars weep

[sovay]

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!

Comments

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

I am sorry that you've lost so dear an artist to you, a star that you followed.

I heard you sing "The Black Swan" once; it was beautiful and part of you, as if your blood accompanied.

Nine

[straussmonster.livejournal.com]

I have to admit that my first, and truly awful thought was: now can get see the original version of Antony and Cleopatra again? Because Menotti, as the librettist/revisor of the second version, has helped keep the first one under wraps for years, IIRC.

[darcydodo]

Oh no! To be fair, I'm astonished to hear that he was still alive, but that said, it's a grievous loss that he's dead.

[clarionj.livejournal.com]

I love those lines you quoted. I don't think I've heard any of these, so in his death you've just kept his art moving. I'd like to hear some of this. And I'm sorry if you'll be missing his physical presence and the end to any new creations.

Nosy flister

[sharonafyre.livejournal.com]

You sing!? (I am new to your journal and was not aware of this.) What is your fach?

I am not familiar with Menotti rep, but my sister sang Mrs. Todd (Old Maid and the Thief) once for a small production.