At 89, Gian Carlo Menotti Says He’s Just the ‘Medium’ for Operas He Has Written

WASHINGTON —  Gian Carlo Menotti is still having a dialogue with God.

“I am trying to settle a few things before I die,” the 89-year-old composer says in his lightly accented voice. “I know I only have a few years left.”

The Italian-born Menotti, one of the most successful composers of the 20th century, has been carrying on that metaphysical conversation through his music for decades.

“The Medium,” his 1946 opera that had a long run on Broadway, asks questions about faith and the unknown; “The Saint of Bleecker Street,” a 1954 work that also enjoyed a Broadway success, deals even more directly and poignantly with religious beliefs and doubts.

“The Consul,” which had a yearlong Broadway stint starting in March 1950, can also be viewed in this light. Hanging over the darkly tragic work is a question directed heavenward: How could God allow such misery, such unfairness?

The forcefulness of those questions invariably seems more potent when Menotti does his own stage direction for “The Consul,” which is the case with the Washington Opera’s production, playing this month at the Kennedy Center here.

This Pulitzer Prize- and New York Drama Critics Circle Award-winning work has long been ranked among the composer’s most inspired creations. Menotti doesn’t hesitate to credit the source of the inspiration.

“I have always felt that art, especially music, is but a demonstration of God,” he says, while lunching at a restaurant in the Watergate Hotel.

“I would like to tell the pope that,” he adds with a smile. “A Schubert song, the A-major chord at the opening of Wagner’s ‘Lohengrin’--such incredible beauty is a mystery, the divinity of music. Composers should be very humble. The ability to compose is a gift from God. You must prepare yourself to receive that gift.”

Menotti compares composers to diviners searching for water with their forked sticks.

“Sometimes you know the water is there, but you just can’t find it,” he says. “And sometimes you are too lazy to dig. I feel I have not dug profoundly enough. I should have worked harder in my life. I suffer from a guilt complex.”

That guilt clearly figures in some of his chats with God. Menotti’s estate in Scotland contains quite a few reasons for that guilt--unfinished scores. One that is officially finished, the 1986 opera “Goya” written for Placido Domingo and premiered by the Washington Opera, gnaws at the composer’s conscience too.

“Domingo told me he’s going to revive ‘Goya’ in Vienna and then take it to Spain,” Menotti says. “That delights me. But I told him I want to redo the third act. I know I wrote it too fast. I counted too much on facility.”

Over the years, Menotti developed a reputation for hastily finishing commissions for vocal and instrumental works; sometimes, the haste showed in the product. The composer has an explanation: the noted Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy, which he founded in 1958; and a counterpart in Charleston, S.C., Spoleto Festival U.S.A., which he founded in 1977 and which quickly became the premier arts festival in this country.

“My greatest mistake was to do the festival,” he says. “I used it as an excuse to work less. Now I regret it bitterly.”

Regrets, He Has a Few

Menotti has another regret associated with the Charleston fest. After a falling out with the board of directors in 1993, partly over a controversial art exhibit, he severed all ties to the American venture. It has continued to thrive, however, under its original name. The use of that name doesn’t sit well with the founder.

“I wish them well,” Menotti says, “but they should call it the Charleston Festival; they should not be ashamed to use the name of their own city. I begged them not to use the Spoleto name. It causes so much confusion.”

Otherwise, the composer seems to have few complaints, other than aging. “I’m a tired old man,” he says, but it’s hard to take that seriously. He rattles off his ailments: the need for a cane, a loss of sight in one eye, a loss of hearing in one ear, difficulty remembering names. “And my heart is in pieces,” he says, but by now he’s grinning almost impishly.

If Menotti is showing a few signs of his age, he’s wearing them well. And he’s nearly as active as he was at 79.

He’s still very involved in running the Spoleto Festival with his adopted son. He’ll direct “The Saint of Bleecker Street” there this summer (the festival will also hold a gala concert for his 90th birthday); last summer, he stepped in to direct Prokofiev’s monumental operatic version of “War and Peace” after the scheduled director got cold feet.

Menotti continues to direct his own operas; in addition to the Washington production of “The Consul,” he presided over a Buenos Aires production last year. Even when he doesn’t do the directing, he’s likely to attend significant presentations of his works all over the globe, including a recent staging of “The Consul” in Vienna.

Menotti is amused by the attention he is receiving from opera companies these days.

“I have the feeling that everybody was waiting for me to die so they could rediscover me,” he says. “Then they found out I’m not dead yet, so they are rediscovering me while I’m still alive.”

Menotti was first discovered in 1938, when his comic one-act opera, “Amelia Goes to the Ball,” was staged at the Metropolitan--an extraordinary distinction for an unknown 20-year-old composer. His next opera, “The Old Man and the Thief,” was written for the exotic medium of radio in 1939, carrying his name further. He would later compose two operas for the even more exotic medium of television; the first, “Amahl and the Night Visitors,” in 1951, would quickly become a Christmastime favorite the world over.

When “The Medium” opened at New York’s Ethel Barrymore Theatre in 1947, Menotti confounded some people. What was a dramatic opera doing in a place where musical comedies were performed?

“I didn’t set out to write an opera for Broadway,” he says. “I wanted to do opera in a small theater, away from a big opera house, to prove that an opera can be given with the same care as a play, and that it can be opened to a wider audience.

“When my first publisher found out I was writing a chamber opera--and one about a medium--they were furious. They couldn’t believe I would go to small theater after being at the Met, so they fired me.”

Menotti quickly found another publisher--and the justification for his concept of opera as intimate, gripping theater. “The Medium’s” extraordinary eight-month run intensified interest in this dynamic new force in American music, one with a distinctively lyrical, accessible style and a flair for compelling librettos (Menotti has always written his own texts for his operas).

News Account Inspired ‘Consul’

“The Consul,” a taut fusion of music and drama that draws us deeply into the sufferings of people trapped in an unspecified European police state, unable to break through bureaucratic red tape and paperwork preventing their escape to freedom, sealed Menotti’s reputation.

The issues raised by “The Consul” were very fresh in 1950, with Europe still feeling the effects of World War II. Menotti was moved to write the work from a newspaper item: A Polish woman, denied entry into the U.S., committed suicide on Ellis Island.

That incident, combined with experiences from his own life, helped inspire Menotti’s words and drive the music. But some critics questioned the longevity of an opera so wedded to contemporary events. “They predicted that it would be just a short-lived work,” the composer says. “But the situations in ‘The Consul’ exist more than ever today in Europe, Africa, Asia. Everyone seems to be fleeing from some country.”

The opera’s most famous scenes--people waiting hopelessly outside the office of the unnamed, unseen consul, desperate for the proper papers--have been repeated too often in the decades since “The Consul’s” premiere. Repressive states remain. Brave souls still risk their lives to resist.

Current events could easily trigger another opera from Menotti if he were younger, he says.

“The new millennium is frightening,” he says. “I was just reading today about AIDS in Africa affecting millions--my God, millions! But I think if I were to write an opera now it would be about the thirst for power. That’s what frightens me most. Money doesn’t mean anything anymore, except as a means to acquire power. And for what? What will people do with all that power?

“We are not ruled by governments anymore, but by big corporations who buy up each other. It is incredible how everything is now run by these huge companies. I am not so optimistic about the future of the world.”

But Menotti isn’t all gloom. His wry sense of humor flares as he zeros in on another aspect of modern life that he would love to fashion into a comic opera--again, if he were only younger:

“I am convinced that things do not work as well as they did when people performed the tasks now done by machines,” he says. “You try to phone someone, and you hear, ‘Press 1, press 2, press 7.’ And you still never get to reach the person you are calling.

“And at the airport, I ask when my flight leaves”--here Menotti starts imitating the motions of a clerk furiously typing, pausing, typing some more, pausing, getting a quizzical expression on his face, typing some more. “Then, finally, comes the answer, 4:17.”

The composer has no shortage of other pet peeves.

Singers with poor diction: “I insist that in opera every word has its own musical importance.”

Not enough good tenors, basses and contraltos, “but lots of conductors--that goes back to my theory about the thirst for power.”

Conductors who don’t take enough time to finish one phrase before moving on to the next, and who don’t allow enough freedom of expression from singers or instrumentalists.

Opera productions that fiddle with the original settings or themes of a work. “I rarely go to an opera because I suffer,” he says. “I am so horrified by the new wave of stage directors. You should not contradict the particular period expressed by a work of art. You can’t put a rococo frame on a Picasso painting. You have to respect the composer’s poetic vision.”

At that moment, a waiter stops by to check on things. Menotti looks up at him with a wide smile and asks, “What are your poetic visions?”