Composer on Broadway

On a rain-dashed afternoon in the spring of 1947 a lean, tense-looking man in his mid-30s walked into Manhattan's Edison Hotel, just off Broadway, and registered for a room. He specified that it must overlook 47th Street. Once upstairs, he walked quickly to the window, looked down on the street below, satisfied himself that the view was right, then turned away and began to pace the floor, chainsmoking cigarettes. Finally he settled down to a vigil at the window. With alert brown eyes he watched the bustling traffic on the sidewalks. How many of the passers-by would stop at the Ethel Barrymore Theater across the street? How many, once they stopped, would buy tickets for the show that had just opened?

Gian-Carlo Menotti had good reason for counting every patron. For production in the close academic air of Columbia University, he had composed a compact little two-act opera called The Medium, and it had gone on Broadway. It was a grim and eerie story of an old faker who finally, at one of her seances, feels the touch of one of the spirits she has pretended to reach for so many years, and consequently goes mad. It was hardly a cheery subject; moreover, it was all 'opera. Every line and word was sung, and its music yielded nothing at all to Broadway's cotton-candy musical tradition.

Yet Composer Menotti had let two Broadway neophytes named Chandler Cowles and Efrem Zimbalist Jr., both 28, convince him that they could make The Medium a success on the Main Stem.

Spread the Word. From his hotel window Menotti saw few patrons; the advance sale for The Medium (and for a short Menotti curtain raiser called The Telephone) came to just $47. For the first few weeks of the run most of the audience could have been taken home each night in a Broadway bus. And many of them turned out to be just the same old admirers coming back again.

But the critics, who had generally cheered The Medium and The Telephone, were busy with more stories of the new operas, and so were the faithful in Menotti's audience. The word spread: Menotti had taken the grand airs out of opera, brought to it the realism and immediacy of the 20th Century theater. And, best of all, his operas were in English and the plain playgoer could understand every word.

For the last two months of the seven-month run, the Barrymore had a sellout.

Even La Sea la. Last week, Italian-born Composer Menotti's days of counting the customers seemed to be over, and that was a prospect that Menotti was regarding with considerable concern. A few days after his new opera, The Consul, opened on Broadway (TIME, March 27), he phoned Producer Cowles and said in a subdued voice: "Well, I guess we have a success on our hands. Now is when we must be humble."

The Consul, Menotti's first three-acter, has a plot that is just as drab as The Medium's: the story of a desperate woman in a police state who commits suicide when her last attempt to get a visa fails. It is longer and not so compact, but it packs more than The Medium's share of melodramatic punch. It opened on Broadway with a $100,000 advance sale; by last week all seats were sold out through June.

It had also won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for the year's best "musical" (opera was still considered too strong a word for Broadway; The Consul was billed as a "musical drama"). Decca Records was recording it with the original cast, and Hollywood was shouting offers, none of which seemed to be of much interest to 38-year-old Composer Menotti. What pleased him considerably more was that Milan's La Scala, which snooted his first five operas, had asked permission to produce The Consul in Italian late this year. Menotti felt hopeful that his acceptance by La Scala, at long last, might even persuade his family back in Italy that he amounted to something. Wails Menotti: "I keep telling them I am famous in America, famous! They just look at me sympathetically."

The Met Habit. A modest man, Menotti would be the last to claim preeminence as an operatic composer at work in a world which includes Sergei Prokofiev and Igor Stravinsky. But even his relations in Italy might yet have to admit that he is the most successful at work in the U.S.

Yet he has no apparent interest whatever in working his way from Broadway to the U.S.'s opera citadel, the Metropolitan. For one thing he had his fling at the Met before Broadway. His first opera, Amelia Goes to the Ball, composed when he was 25, was played for two seasons (seven performances) by the Met, and his third, The Island God, a flop, had four performances. He recalls the Met's productions with distaste: "For The Island God they dragged on some rocks that looked like the third act of Die Walkure." The Met's huge stage, ceremonial trappings and big voices demand a grander canvas than Menotti now chooses to paint his tight little operas on. Moreover, the Met audience, to him, is "not an audience but a habit."

Death & Tears. Menotti is an operatic one-man show who writes his own librettos and his own music, then stages and directs the whole production as well. He has been doing that sort of thing since he was eleven.

The youthful Gian-Carlo ("a beautiful child until my nose began to grow") first thought of becoming a composer when he was six; he remembers setting "the most erotic verses of D'Annunzio to angelic little tunes." It was a marionette theater, which his mother gave him when he was nine, that decided his course. Before long, he was pulling the strings of 50 puppets, making all the costumes and inventing all the stories--most of them about dragons, princesses, ogres and death. "We Italians are clowns in a way," he says in softly accented English, "but fundamentally we are a vaaary glooomy race. It is death, death, tragedy and tears all the time."

He was the ninth child of a father who made a fortune in the import-export business in South America, then returned to his pink villa in the little town of Cadegliano overlooking Lake Lugano to settle down to the quiet life. Gian-Carlo's mother, a dynamic woman who took up painting at 60, the guitar at 62, was the main influence in his life. An artistic woman herself, she sought out talent among all of her children, especially lavished her attention on little Gian-Carlo, who seemed to have the most.

"Do You Promise Me?" By the time he was 16, Gian-Carlo had composed two operas and finished five years of ginnasio and a year and a half of liceo in Milan--"the usual European classical education, a great bore." Far from a bore for him were the family's jaunts to their box at La Scala to hear Toscanini conduct opera.

Gian-Carlo's musical talent was making him something of a problem child, known as "I'enfant prodige" around Milanese salons. His mother put an end to that. Father Menotti had died, so she packed Gian-Carlo off to Colombia with her to settle her husband's affairs. On the way back to Italy, she stopped in New York, and asked Tullio Serafin, then a top conductor at the Metropolitan, what she should do with her talented but untempered son. The next thing Gian-Carlo knew, he had been plunked down before Composition Teacher Rosario Scalero at Philadelphia's Curtis Institute of Music. He knew hardly a word of English.

Recalls Teacher Scalero, now 79, retired and living in Italy: "The boy had some stuff in him, but he was most undisciplined and raw." Fixing him with a stern eye, he said, "GianCarlo, if I am to teach you, we must come to an agreement, you and I. I promise you that I will be uncompromisingly severe. Do you promise me to put in some very hard work, something you have never done before?" Gian-Carlo promised. And, says Scalero, "he abided by his agreement." Thanks to Scalero's perseverance in making him compose simple motets (polyphonic choral works), Menotti is now a master at writing canons (the complicated, contrapuntal version of what children sing in "rounds" such as Row, Row, Row Your Boat), and they continually show up in his operas in clever trios, quartets, and quintets.

At Curtis, Gian-Carlo Menotti met another young composition student named Samuel Barber who, luckily for Gian-Carlo, had studied Italian. Sam's mother,

Mrs. S. Leroy Barber, who does not speak Italian, recalls Gian-Carlo's first visit to their West Chester, Pa. home. They could only stare at each other when Sam was out of the room. Finally, when it became time to leave, Mrs. Barber recalls, Gian-Carlo shook her hand warmly and tried to explain: "I have many thinks but few words."

Faith In Faith. Since those days, Gian-Carlo has had both "many thinks" and many words. Not a few of them have gone into his operas. He put his concern with faith into The Medium; he was raised a Roman Catholic, and although he says he has lost his religious faith, "I have not lost faith in faith." In The Consul his thesis is "To this we've come; that men withhold the world from men . . ."

Menotti, still an Italian citizen, often stammers in his native language, but after 20 years in the U.S., his English is unfaltering and fluent. When he sits down to work his ideas into words & music, he finds that suggestions for both generally occur to him simultaneously. The result, as in his heroine's second-act aria in The Consul, is not only moving music but clean, singable English:

What is your name? Magda Sorel.

Age? Thirty-three.

What does that matter? . .

What is your name?

What is your name?

What is your name?

This is my answer: my name is woman.

Age: still young.

Color of hair: grey.

Color of eyes: the color of tears.

Occupation: waiting, waiting, waiting.

Since his experiences with the Metropolitan, Menotti has always insisted on doing his own staging and directing. ("As stage director I am always faithful to the composer.") In Cowles and Zimbalist,

Menotti has two producers who leave him strictly to his own devices. These include an unblushing use of dramatic tricks such as spooky seances, shattering windowpanes, hypnotism, magicians, eerie dream dances.

A Form of Remembrance. The music that goes with all this is in turn sentimental, sophisticated, stark and powerful, and always apt and unpretentious. Even when it consists of ordinary material, it is always well made.

At heart, Menotti is a melodic composer for whom "melody is a form of remembrance ... it must have a quality of inevitability in our ears." His arias come to him easily, his long recitatives more painfully. "The hardest work I do," he says, "is on the little musical phrases in the recitatives that no one but a few astute musicians hear." He has made a lilting, hurdy-gurdyish 3/4rhythm, among other musical devices, particularly his own.

He has most often been likened to Puccini. Bar for bar, he bears scant resemblance, but Menotti's tender and romantic passages in particular come to the ear with something of Puccini's melodramatic appeal. Actually, Menotti says that Mussorgsky has been more his model; he has obviously learned from both Debussy and Prokofiev, too. He seldom strays far from traditional tonality, although he often uses sharp or strong dissonance for effect.

In a day of cream-puffy orchestration, Menotti uses his small orchestra with repression. Orchestration, as such, does not interest him: "I do it as fast as possible, and that's that," he says. "What interests me is the human animal up there on the stage singing."

With this preoccupation, he has brought a new kind of singing actress to the fore. Menotti singers such as Marie Powers and his latest discovery, tall, dark-eyed, Brooklyn-born Patricia Neway, 27, the star of The Consul, may be vocally a step below the Met; dramatically they are well above it.

Not One Note. When he is not jumping from desk chair to piano bench composing his operas, Menotti occasionally likes to try some dramatics himself. Sociable, voluble, and almost childishly concerned and curious about other people ("He has the soul of a concierge," says Cowles), he loves to pack his roomy, rambling house in Mt. Kisco, N.Y. with weekend guests. On such occasions, they often play "The Game"--charades. Says Cowles: "Menotti is a very hammy actor, and he always insists on making all the rules."

He works "consistently"--that is, all day. But he is too restless to work more than ten minutes at a time. "I telephone someone, walk around or something. I like to break it up, come back to what I have written as something new and fresh." He does not have to worry about neighbors overhearing him at work. He and his partners in the eight-room Mt. Kisco place, who include Composer Sam Barber and Poet Robert Horan, now own 70 acres of hilly, wooded land surrounding the house.

Menotti loves to argue philosophy before the fire, but he hates to haggle in the world of Broadway, where his successes have taken him. Says Producer Cowles, by now a case-hardened Broadwayite: "Anybody can get anything from Menotti if they just yell at him." So far no one has been able to yell him down on his own notions of artistic integrity. Menotti's formula is simple: "I take less money and get the kind of contract I want." He is probably the only musician ever to extort a contract from Hollywood (for two scripts in 1947) which provided that not one word, nor one note of his music, if he chose to write any, was to be changed. To nobody's surprise, no movie ever came of it. He has been embarrassingly direct with potential backers, too. At money-raising auditions for The Consul last winter, Menotti, who believes "opera should be an art, not an investment," almost queered the deal by declaring in solemn, admonitory speeches that "My opera is vaaary glooomy." His frantic producers later sent him a hand-painted tie with his warning on it.

For the Soul. With the Shuberts, who own the Ethel Barrymore, planning to keep The Consul running on Broadway for two years, Menotti thought it was high time to "watch out for success." He was not overly concerned with where he stood in the great operatic tradition. He had not discovered anything brand-new, and he knew it. Paul Hindemith, Ernst Krenek and the late Kurt Weill had broken the ground for him in Germany in the '20s. Austrian Atonalist Alban Berg's gloomy Wozzeck had moved opera musically miles from the Verdis and Monteverdis.

But with his freshness of dramatic invention, Menotti has been more successful at putting opera over in the U.S. than any other composer of his own generation. English Composer Benjamin Britten has had spectacular success in grand opera houses with his bigger and more traditional opera Peter Grimes, and his chamber operas Albert Herring and Let's Make an Opera are successful in Britain and Europe. His lone Broadway production, The Rape of Lucretia, was a flop.

Menotti is smart enough to know that "if you start running after successes you're through." He feels that "any subject is good for opera if the composer feels it so intensely he must sing it out." He is sure his inspiration would fail if he tried to compose the same kind of opera time & again. Moreover, he argues that although the public shouts, "That was fine, give us another just like that," it really "does not want what it thinks it wants." Generally, he thinks the U.S. public is too unresponsive about what it hears. Last week he told a Manhattan Women's City Club audience "to applaud us if you like the music, throw potatoes at us if you don't--but don't just sit there."

He has plenty of work cut out for himself. Later this month he will sail for Italy to catch up on his share of hometown fame. He will make a movie of The Medium, later supervise productions of The Consul in London and Paris, as well as at La Scala. In his dedication to opera, he regrets that he has not had greater chance for orchestral composition. He has written a piano concerto and a ballet suite, Sebastian, is currently working on a violin concerto.

Menotti, who naturally likes his new success but also fears it, tells his friends that he thinks it would be good for his soul if his next opera were a flop. He is giving himself plenty of chance to compose one. NBC has commissioned an opera for television, to be called Irene and the Gypsies. He is also thinking about two more three-acters, tentatively called The Leper and The Saint of Bleecker Street--for Broadway.

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