Opera Chic

50th Festival dei Due Mondi: In Memory of Gian carlo Menotti

The 50th Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto will open on June 29 with the late Gian Carlo Menotti's opera Maria Golovin, and it will close on July 15 with the Concerto in Piazza, where more Menotti music will be played.

On July 7th, the day of Menotti's birthday, Charles Abell will conduct a Menotti concert. Directors Terry Gilliam (who'll direct Andrea Chenier at la Scala next season) and Paul Mazursky will appear in Spoleto to introduce small festivals showing their films; Andy Garcia and actress Ines Sastre will introduce their film The Lost City.

The whole program is here (page with sound and embedded video).

After Menotti: The Two Spoletos To Reunite?

From the Associated Press:

The death of renowned composer Gian Carlo Menotti has sparked speculation that the Italian Spoleto festival and the second festival Menotti founded in Charleston three decades ago could again collaborate.

Menotti, who died last week, established the Spoleto Festival USA here in 1977 as a companion to his Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy.

The festivals shared some artists and productions over the years, but that ended in 1993 when Menotti left the American festival in an ongoing dispute over finances and his successor.

But Spoleto Festival USA officials say linking the arts festivals again could benefit both events.

Menotti: Funeral + Concert in Monte Carlo

Opera Chic has just heard that Gian Carlo Menotti's funeral will take place next Saturday at 1030 AM in Monte Carlo's Cathedral. After the memorial service, a concert of Menotti's music will take place in the Principality's Salle Garnier.

As reported yesterday by Opera Chic, the maestro will eventually be buried in his Scottish mansion, Yester House.

^^^UPDATE^^^

Opera Chic is honored to have received a comment from Maestro Francesco Maria Colombo, spectacularly talented young conductor, Menotti personal friend and protegé, occasional blogger of almost scary wit and recipient -- from Menotti's hands -- of Thomas Schippers's baton.

We are happy to copy-and-paste FMC's comment on the front page here, and Opera Chic thanks him for it:

"When I visited Gian Carlo in Scotland, in his last years there, he drove me many times to see the place where he wanted to be buried. It's a little, little and cozy old cemetery in the middle of the Lammermoors, nobody visits it, and the path to it is tangled in a deep wood. He was very proud of the choice, and there was some tongue-in-cheek attitude in it. And let's not forget what was the last supreme masterpiece of his life: to die in Monte-Carlo. He was absolutely sure to go there to die. How chic, how sparkling, how naughty, how sassy, how Menottian..."

Menotti's Funeral

Opera Chic has just heard that invitations to the memorial service for Gian Carlo Menotti have been delivered today: since Menotti's friends will have to come from all over the world, and because of some other organization issues, it will happen on February 10th, in Monte Carlo (where the maestro passed away).

It will be a religious service -- Menotti, always deeply interested in religion, who described himself as "half believer, half skeptical sinner", received communion and Catholic last rites on his death bed.

Then from Monte Carlo the body of the maestro will be flown to Scotland, where he will be buried in a very private ceremony (only his son, nephew, tight family members, and advisers will be in attendance). Why Scotland? Because it's where he lived part of the year for the last 35 years. In his beloved mansion, Yester House, in Gifford, East Lothian.

And what about Spoleto? Nothing.

Fo, Chailly, Colombo Remember Menotti

In today's Corriere della Sera, Nobel Laureate Dario Fo and conductors Riccardo Chailly and Francesco Maria Colombo remember their friend (and in Colombo's case, mentor) Gian Carlo Menotti.

Dario Fo (who often performed in Spoleto):

"They called him the Duke of Spoleto and he was a duke indeed: he had intellectual elegance, honesty, style: a gentleman of infinte culture and refinement, truly a Renaissance man. And a brave man: he protected me from censorship. His all-ecompassing intellect, his friendship with the best artists in the world turned Spoleto into a world-class Festival. He deserved a monument; instead, administrators unfit to run a drugstore tried to diminish his role and tried to disturb his work".

Francesco Maria Colombo, young conductor (the first-ever US performance of Mercadante's Orazi e Curiazi in Minneapolis last year, a recent, acclaimed Trovatore in Cremona) and sometimes blogger and former music critic for Corriere della Sera who was convinced by Menotti to devote himself full-time to conducting: 

"He changed my life. He gave me Thomas Schippers's baton as a sign of his trust in my abilities. He was a fascinating man, he had rubbed shoulders with History for his entire life: a friend of Chaplin and Cocteau, he went sailing with Garbo and was Jacqueline Kennedy's dinner companion... He had the gift of simultaneous lightness and depth. A great composer, with a knack for tenderness that is unique in the 20th century. Too often Italy has forgotten his greatness".

Riccardo Chailly:

"There was nobody like Menotti: his unique ability to live between cultures, Italy and the USA, and create a common musical language. Il Telefono, a genius score that is still fresh, is an example of Menotti's greatness. A giant of the 20th century".

^^^update^^^

La Repubblica reports a great story: on Easter Day, 2001, Gian Carlo Menotti had dinner with Martin Scorsese, discussing a project that, sadly, never materialised but is boggling Opera Chic's Verdi-loving mind: a Scorsese-directed Trovatore in Spoleto.

Gian Carlo Menotti in His Own Words

From today's Italian newspapers:

"What will the critics write when I die? I really don't know. And I hope I'll have better things to do than read the newspapers, then. When I was alive, they wrote all kinds of things. Better yet, the Italian critics mostly wrote that I am not a contemporary composer.  Because most critics want to be the ones who decide everything about art, about time, about life itself. Success doesn't count; no, it even makes you suspect.

What is fame? Years ago I had to drive from Spoleto to my hometown, Cadegliano, in the North. We were driving too fast, and close to Varese we were stopped by the police. I didn't have my driving license. I'm Gian Carlo Menotti, I said. Who? I was finally recognised by the lady who ran a bakery in my home town. She didn't know my work, she just remembered me as my momma's son".

Il Giornale

"My secret? How to age gracefully? Never commit dates to memory, especially historical ones. I don't know when Cristoforo Colombo discovered America, but I know America very well -- it's way more important.  Second: I love flowers, their colors and scents; but I don't know their names. Third: call the doctor only in cases of real emergency".

"I have to walk with a cane now: when I was young, the upper part of my body didn't work that well, the lower part instead worked great. Now that I'm 90, it's the other way around"

"Religion? I'm half believer, half skeptical sinner"

La Repubblica

^^^update^^^

Corriere della Sera has a great quote from an old (1963) Menotti interview with the late Oriana Fallaci:

"I've always felt guilty, that I wasn't doing enough for others. And I've felt a constant terror, the terror to be useless... If I had Verdi's gift, the abilty to inspire the masses with music, I'd be satisfied.  But I don't have that gift, I am aware of my own limitations, and I try to do something different. See, art nowadays is an exotic plant that humanity does not recognise, and does not understand. The artist, an ornament to society, not an essential part of it. One writes, but for whom?"

***BREAKING NEWS: GIAN CARLO MENOTTI DIES AT 95***

Maestro Gian Carlo Menotti died today in Monte Carlo. He was 95 years old.

Small AP item here. Son Francis to AP: "He died in my arms". New York Times obit

NPR: Menotti, Cultural Giant

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Los Angeles Times obit

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Italian President Giorgio Napolitano in a statement just paid tribute to Menotti's "unique  artistic genius".

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2001 Andante appreciation here: Gian Carlo Menotti at 90

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The last hurrah: Italian radio reports that Menotti appeared last in public on Dec 10, 2006, in Rome, at Parco della Musica: he was in the audience at the performance of his Concert in F, conducted by James Conlon.

(photo above credit Festival Dei Due Mondi)

Alex Ross on Menotti's legacy here

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Playbill obit

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Tim Page on Menotti

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Menotti in 2001, in a long Corriere della Sera (July 8 issue) profile for his 90th birthday: "Why did I embark in such an adventure? Why Spoleto? (ed: he's talking about the birth of  his Spoleto Festival) Because in my 50s, I felt guilty: I wanted to rebel against the idea of the artist as entertainer, as society's clown. I wanted to show again that artists are an asset for society and, why not, for the economy as well. I wanted to be useful. I chose Spoleto".

In the interview Menotti explained how he managed to convince artists to work for a non-profit like Spoleto, how he talked Henry Moore into creating sets and costumes for a 1967 Don Giovanni for free (in the end, Moore even donated 5,000 dollars to the Festival coffers: Menotti after all had just sold one of his Modiglianis to raise funds for the Festival), how he convinced famously wary -- and canny businessman -- Luchino Visconti into directing  Manon Lescaut for even less than room and board (just the use of a small apartment in Spoleto for the season). Once, Richard Burton, Thomas Schippers, Leonard Bernstein and Menotti raffled off a dinner date with them to raise funds for the Festival. (ed: Opera Chic now feels that she HAS to write a play about that night: "My Dinner With Lenny, Tommy, Rick and Gian Carlo") 

Menotti re: his massive popularity abroad: "I've always traveled with an Italian passport: sono italiano".

Menotti re: his method. "I owe a huge debt to Puccini: he taught me how to use the parlar cantando, how not to split an opera into recitativi and arias blocking the action."

Menotti re: the composer who impressed him the most. "Schubert".

Menotti re: Boulez. "A con man who writes unreadable, nonsensical books".

Menotti re: Luigi Nono. "He said I was a tool of American Imperialism".

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