Opera in Small Packages

Contemporary composers rarely crash the culture-pearly gates of the Metropolitan Opera Company. Italian-born Gian-Carlo Menotti has done it twice in the past ten years. It has been an honor unaccompanied by noises of a cash register. Menotti's 1937 Amelia Goes to the Ball and his 1942 The Island God together got only nine Met performances (he was paid about $150 a time). In 1939 he wrote a modest little chamber opera for the radio, The Old Maid and the Thief, which has since been given 100 times and earned far more than his grand operas.

Menotti, whose music is also his living, learned a lesson. Last week in Manhattan he staged the world premiere of his third and latest chamber opera, The Telephone--a trivial, tuneful skit-to-music. He paired it with his last year's hit, The Medium, and together they have already brought him offers of a touring road company and a Broadway showing.

As a libretto, his 30-minute Telephone is little more than a trite gag. (An impatient lover tries to propose to his girl, is repeatedly interrupted when her phone rings; finally dashes to the corner drugstore, calls her up himself and makes the grade.) But the music is a briskly running satirical commentary that requires only a 13-piece orchestra to play it, and one soprano and one baritone to sing it. College and small-town music groups could tackle it easily--musically or financially.

Menotti has no illusions about becoming a "rich composer." In spite of his operas, ballet music and two fellowship grants, he still has to teach composition at Philadelphia's Curtis Institute of Music.

With Fellow Composer Samuel Barber, Poet Robert Horan and a cocker spaniel, he lives in Mt. Kisco, N.Y. He is still an Italian citizen, but except for Amelia Goes to the Ball, his work is almost unknown in his native Italy. When the war came Mussolini's censors put Menotti on the forbidden list. Anyway, opera like The Telephone wouldn't be grand enough. Says Menotti: "In Italy they hate chamber opera. They like to have about 500 people in the cast."

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