about the composer

Gian Carlo Menotti (1911-2007):

"One of the essential ingredients for music to sound 'modern' ... is the constant and unrelieved use of dissonances. I don't know why dissonance per se should be more exciting or interesting than consonance ... There are people who consider it essential for contemporary music to be nervous and intense. Again, why should tension be more interesting than serenity? Artists struggling to be original seem to be unaware that there is only one way to be honestly and candidly oneself ... I am convinced that composition is more an act of discovery than of creation ... and only when I feel I have reached the inner chambers of my heart, I know that I have become an original composer."

The human voice played a significant role in Menotti's work, and the bulk of his output consists of opera, musical theater, and choral music, for most of which he composed both music and text. He created the first opera for radio, The Old Maid and the Thief (1939), and for television, Amahl and the Night Visitors (1951), and wrote a number of ballets and works for children.

Menotti was born to a family of ten children in Cadegliano, Italy. He began composing songs at age seven, under the guidance of his mother; four years later, when he became a student at the Milan Conservatory, he had already written two operas. In 1928 he continued his education at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where he studied composition with Rosario Scalero and developed a close relationship with Samuel Barber. Menotti's first completed work after graduating from Curtis was the one-act opera buffa Amelia Goes to the Ball (1936), the success of which initiated his long career of international commissions and performances of dramatic and instrumental works.

Menotti received the Pulitzer Prize in music and Drama Critics' Circle Award for both The Consul (1949) and The Saint of Bleecker Street (1954). Two works from the 1940's, The Medium (1945) and The Telephone (1946), were presented in Europe in a 1955 tour organized by the US State Department. In 1958 Menotti founded the Spoleto Festival of Two Worlds in Italy, devoted to cultural collaboration between Europe and America; in 1977 he founded Spoleto USA in Charleston, South Carolina, the second of its Two Worlds. He directed both festivals for much of his life, and also served as director of the Rome Opera and other productions worldwide. In 1984 Menotti received the Kennedy Center Honor for lifetime achievement in the arts.