Gian Carlo Menotti

Biography

The Italian-American opera and ballet composer Gian Carlo Menotti was once praised by critic Virgil Thomson, in the New York Herald Tribune, for a “frankly Italianate treatment of ordinary human beings as thoroughly interesting in every way.”

His best known opera is a one-act work that has become part of the Christmas season, Amahl and the Night Visitors. This was the first opera ever specifically commissioned for a television broadcast. Amahl was first performed December 24, 1951, at an NBC Studio in Rockefeller Center. Menotti’s works also include a notable broadcast opera from a dozen years before that, The Old Maid and the Thief, a 1939 opus composed for radio broadcast. This helped establish this Italian immigrant’s career in the United States, and it proved musically influential due to two particular arias, “What curse for a woman, is a timid man (Steal me, sweet thief),” and “When the air sings of summer.”

In the 1980s, Menotti was still composing operas, including Goya (1986) and The Wedding (1988).