Dear Departed Menotti
One of my favorites, Gian Carol Menotti, passed on today at the age of 95. I will certainly write more about him later--his brilliance when he was good, his weird presence as an Italian composer in America--but for now I am actually a little too broken up to do it. His was the first music I loved--The Medium, The Saint of Bleecker Street, and especially The Consul were the pieces that made me not only want to compose but compose opera. I know it is hardly out of turn to die just shy of a century on the planet, but it is hard to square his absence (though I never knew him). The world weighs less tonight with him gone.
posted by Daniel at 9:08 PM
3 Comments:
I, too, am greatly saddened by this loss. Like you, I was deeply impacted as a young musician by totally absorbing "Amahl," "The Consul," etc. Fortunately, I had an all-too-brief opportunity to meet him and thank him in person for the gift of his music. For now, all I can do is put on "The Death of the Bishop of Brindisi" and listen to that final, consoling chorus: "Sleep, sleep in peace, O gentle pilgrim ..."
Thanks, belatedly, for making note of Menotti's passing.
The German label Arthaus has just released a DVD of Menotti's "space opera" "Help, Help, the Globolinks," which was originally made for German TV in the late 1960s.
I recently played the part of Monica in a recent production of The Medium. I had not known much of his work before this but have now been inspired to listen, perform and apprecciate more of the very original and beautiful music Menotti created. There is no limit to the amount of times his music can move a person.
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