Radio Opera

One evening in 1937 Philadelphia's Curtis Institute of Music presented to the public two one-act operas. What the critics came to hear was Le Pauvre Matelot, by one of the most famous of French modernist composers, Darius Milhaud. But what held them in their seats and sent them home happy was the light, tripping music and witty text of a little musical farce called Amelia Goes to the Ball, by an unknown graduate of the Institute, a youngster of 25 named Gian-Carlo Menotti. Next year Amelia made the Metropolitan, was so successful that it became a permanent part of the Met's repertory.

On the heels of Amelia's, success, NBC officials commissioned Composer Menotti to write another opera, this time for the radio. Composer Menotti accepted the commission, but took his time about writing the opera. To the annoyance of NBC's program arrangers, it was not until last fortnight that Menotti put the finishing touches to his score. Last week the new radio opera had its world premiere, on the Saturday night "Toscanini Hour."

Like Amelia, Menotti's new opus, The Old Maid and the Thief, was a farcical satire on feminine foibles. Its plot: a very pleasant, honest tramp so ingratiates himself with an old maid and her maidservant that they make him a permanent guest, even stealing liquor from a neighboring store (the heroine, a member of the town's temperance league, can't buy it publicly) to keep him contented. News that a notorious criminal, of similar description, has just escaped from a neighboring jail disturbs the old maid somewhat, but she reflects that "it is better to be killed by a man than to live without one." The police, on a house-to-house search for the robber of the liquor store, frighten the innocent tramp, and he flees in the old maid's car, taking her maid and most of her silverware with him. Moral: "A woman can do what the Devil himself can't do: make a thief of an honest man."

To this inconsequential libretto, Menotti added a fluffy, flippant, craftsmanlike score, bristling with tart melodies and limpid orchestration. NBC's studio audience of critics and musical celebrities guffawed, applauded and went home certain: 1) that Composer Menotti had turned out another operatic bestseller, 2) that he was still the most promising young composer on today's operatic horizon.

Gian-Carlo Menotti got most of his musical education at Philadelphia's Curtis Institute, but he speaks English with an Italian accent, still regards Italy, where his family lives, as his home. In Manhattan, where he now spends most of the winter, Composer Menotti inhabits a penthouse which was originally a water tank, on the roof of an uptown apartment building.

Composer Menotti is not worried about opera's future. Chief troubles with it nowadays, he feels, are that its theatres are too big, its language foreign, its settings antiquated. A simple melodist in his own music, Menotti dismisses most modernists as bad craftsmen, thinks the salvation of music lies in a return to intelligible musical language. U. S. composers, he thinks, are under an unfair handicap: "You still want foreign names; that's one thing that has been in my favor." About his operatic preoccupation with feminine foibles, 27-year-old Menotti explains: "Women, to fascinate men, must not be too good. I'm celebrating the wickedness of women."

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