OPERA FOR THE HOME
Shipler, Diane
Opera for the Home By Diane Shipler WHEN Gian-Carlo Menotti finally got down to doing some serious thinking about writing an opera for television, a project he had been putting off for several...
...It is stark tragedy...
...andNthey wonder if there isn't some way to get back their old, lost love...
...They must also be photogenic...
...Joyfully he goes off with the kings on the pilgrimage to Bethlehem...
...As he does so, he finds he can walk and is miraculously cured of his lameness...
...Amahl and the Night Visitors will undoubtedly be embedded in NBC's Christmas programming for many years to come...
...Not from overwork or the intense pressure he was under to get the new opera in shape in time, although these things certainly helped...
...She's much too worried about their extreme poverty— there's nothing to eat, and no wood to build a fire—to be bothered...
...Two years passed...
...It was too long and dull...
...It is just as moving as The Consul, but utterly different, full of hope and love and marked with a rare melodic sweetness...
...he can maintain awful suspense...
...Later it went to an hour and presented adaptations of operas...
...Six months later, The Consul, Me-notti's magnificent opera about displaced persons, opened on Broadway and the young Italian composer became a national figure overnight...
...I always have luck," he explained...
...The next time the two men met, Menotti had hit on it...
...While they are asleep, the child's mother, driven frantic by the idea that all those rich gifts are destined for a luckier child than hers, steals some of the gold...
...They once decided the day before the show that the scenery was no good...
...In The Consul, for example, there is much of the pain and terror of our time...
...Leonard Bernstein's opera, Trouble in Tahiti, a delightful satire on life in the suburbs, had been produced twice with notable lack of success before NBC tried it last November...
...The productions are terribly expensive in money, trouble, and time, but the result is well worth the effort...
...Amahl and the Night Visitors had its premiere on Christmas Eve 1951 and met with tremendous critical acclaim...
...Menotti was astonished to learn that little Bill Mclver already knew the role when he was selected to play Amahl this year...
...He would write five pages of the score by working all night, and turn it over to the company in the morning...
...The whole idea behind the Television Opera Theater is to make opera exciting, by eliminating the language barrier, by producing one opera a month with loving care, and by using the TV camera to get a new kind of immediacy and dramatic impact into a rather -tired old art form...
...The Television Opera Theater started three years ago as a half-hour program doing excerpts from operas, like the third act of La Bo-heme...
...The mind is not likely to wander during a performance of The Consul or Amahl, even if you're not much of a music lover...
...And whatever he's saying, you find yourself going along with it, whether his theme is complete despair or childlike faith...
...According to Bill, half the boys in the choir set about mastering the difficult role of Amahl after it made a celebrity out of their friend Chet...
...The boy comes to her rescue by presenting the kings with his crutch, which is all he has...
...The public, exposed to opera in greater numbers than ever before, took it to their hearts...
...Although the cutting is done with the utmost care, Chotzinoff is careful not to represent the TV operas as uncut originals...
...Like Menotti, he is a perfectionist...
...his TV Carmen, for example, was called Scenes from Carmen...
...They avoid each other as much as possible, and when they are together, they quarrel the same old quarrels...
...She is caught in the act, but the kings forgive her...
...It was after looking at an old Flemish painting of the three wise men and the Christ child by Hier-onymous Bosch that Menotti conceived the story of Amahl and the Night Visitors...
...and letters from old opera-goers who are tired of the old, traditional opera and excited by the new...
...Rehearsals continued, and eventually Chotzinoff had a breakdown...
...You see," Chotzinoff told me, looking rather pleased, "he was trapped...
...Too much was happening to him...
...It said that he had been unable to think of an idea for a TV opera and would return the advance...
...After its first performance last Christmas Eve, the network switchboard was inundated with congratulatory calls...
...The theme of the opera is fascinating because it's about ourselves...
...If you've never seen anything of Menotti's, his work is not easy to describe...
...The three kings visit the hut for the DIANE SHIPLER is research associate for John Crosby, whose New York Herald-Tribune column on radio and television has been widely acclaimed and is now syndicated throughout the country...
...What about the advance we paid Menotti...
...Before her current Herald-Tribune post, Miss Shi pier was a writer on Newsweek for four years and, earlier, did publicity work for several foreign relief organizations, including United China Relief and United Free Prance...
...Opera for the Home By Diane Shipler WHEN Gian-Carlo Menotti finally got down to doing some serious thinking about writing an opera for television, a project he had been putting off for several years, he couldn't, at first, think of anything...
...EST, with 10-year-old Bill Mclver in the title role...
...An evil character in the original opera has a fourteen minute aria in which he indicates how evil he is...
...Ill NBC has managed to maintain the high standard it set for its TV operas...
...He lunched with Chotzinoff and outlined one idea which they agreed wasn't very promising...
...Chotzinoff likes to try operas that have not done well in opera houses...
...Menotti catches up your emotions and carries you along with him while he unfolds, in his highly individual style, a tale in simple English told to music of unusual power...
...Sam's wife, Dinah, is going to an analyst...
...Firmly, he told Menotti: "We'll never find him...
...They love it...
...Chotzinoff cabled back, "My dear Menotti: I will wait only ten years [or your opera after which I shall expect you to return the advance...
...The trio sings: Up-to-date kitchen, washing machine...
...Menotti was not worried...
...NBC gave Menotti a year in which to write the TV opera, and paid him half the money in advance...
...Menotti can be shocking...
...After an intensive week of auditioning small boys from all over the city for the title role, Chotzinoff was ready to quit the search...
...They have to act...
...Amahl, on the other hand, is the story of a miracle, told very simply...
...Lovely life, oodles of culture Over TV, Book-of-the-Month Club, Musical tea: it's a wonderful life...
...letters from mothers who are amazed to discover that their children will sit through it...
...Colorful bathrooms, and Life magazine . . . Vitamin B, Chlorophyll toothpaste...
...Other operas they've done include Down in the Valley by Weill, Puccini's Madam Butterfly, Johann Strauss' Fledermaus, The Tales of Hoffman and RSVP by Offenbach, and / Pagliacci...
...They fight * over a gesture, hold conferences over a single camera shot...
...Samuel Chotzinoff began getting sharp queries from the NBC brass: Where is the opera we ordered...
...Everybody wanted to know when the opera would be repeated, and the demand grew to such proportions that Amahl was done again at Easter, although it was hardly an appropriate time for it...
...They did Der Rosenkavalier in its entirety in two one-hour programs a week apart...
...it's contemporary Americana...
...Some critics thought that the simple, beautiful, 40-minute tale was Menotti's finest work...
...There he found the perfect "Amahl," a 12-year-old named Chet Allen...
...The role is too difficult...
...he can bring tears to the sternest eye...
...He's a member of the same choir that produced Chet Allen...
...Finally, after her child and her mother-in-law have died, she commits suicide, onstage...
...Its third performance will be on Christmas Day at 6 p.m...
...Menotti came back without a line written, without an idea...
...He outlined the simple story of a little crippled boy who sees the Star of Bethlehem and tries to describe it to his mother...
...Where traditional opera palls in many places for the uninitiated, Menotti holds his audience every second...
...In The Consul, Menotti's extraordinary gift for stirring the mind and heart simultaneously (the mind by the story, the heart by the music) had reached its height in a deeply moving tragedy about DPs and their hopeless battle against totalitarian red tape...
...This sort of opera, which undoubtedly has wider appeal than, say, Parsifal, as well as the traditional operas that NBC has produced in English translation, brings in lots of mail from TV viewers...
...For television, it was cut from three hours 'to an hour and a half, and it was a huge success...
...II When Menotti outlined his idea for Chotzinoff, Christmas was only two months away but it was obvious that the opera would have to have its premiere at Christmas...
...Chotzinoff and his aides—Peter Herman Adler, the music director, Charles Polacheck, the associate producer, and Kirk Browning, the television director—are all perfectionists about their operas...
...This liad to be eliminated for TV, and his evil was demonstrated, instead, in close-ups of his face...
...Music critic Olin Downes, for one, found the latter arrangement much more satisfactory...
...The National Broadcasting Company had conceived the fine idea of commissioning a top-ranking composer to do an opera for television, but for a time it looked as though this worthy project might never be launched, by Menotti at least...
...And at the end, Sam and Dinah go off together to see the same movie (Dinah doesn't say she's seen it) to escape each other again...
...Ten years earlier Chotzinoff had commissioned the same composer to write an opera for radio, and Menotti had come up with The Old Maid and the Thief...
...Reaction to the Television Opera Theater includes letters from people who have never seen opera and are surprised to find that they enjoy it...
...he has had great success in this because TV's demands are so different...
...Chotzinoff was about to send a cable to Menotti in Rome when he had a message from him...
...There is a wonderful satire on one of those tropical island movies (called Trouble in Tahiti) that Dinah goes to see to escape all this...
...Magda Sorel tries repeatedly and in vain to get a visa so that she can join her husband who has fled the country...
...As it turned out, though, no one need have worried...
...To accomplish this miracle, Menotti hardly slept for a month, Chotzinoff says...
...Chet Allen has grown too tall for the part...
...Chotzinoff, who produces the NBC Television Opera Theater, likes to rehearse an opera for about four months...
...The mother, returning the gold, wishes she could add a gift of her own...
...In three years, it has brought a new kind of opera to the general, non-opera-going public...
...In some cases, the complete opera can be done...
...night...
...However, they decided to go ahead and schedule Amahl for Christmas...
...After The Consul finished its Broadway run, Menotti took it to Europe, forgetting completely, it appeared, that his NBC deadline was fast approaching...
...Instead of the grand extravagant gestures, TV gives you the emotions of the singers in their faces...
...Who could ask Heaven for anything more...
...Chotzinoff knew Menotti well, and his wire did the trick...
...What Chotzinoff couldn't bear was the emotional intensity of the music, day after day...
...A TV opera can switch from scene to scene in a flash...
...Benjamin Britten's Billy Budd, for instance, was a flop in Europe where it was first produced...
...Sam, the husband, is competitive and ruthless in business, and believes that he was meant to reach the top of the heap by besting lesser men...
...Menotti had nothing down on paper...
...Singers are chosen not for their reputations, but for their ability...
...Then they explain the significance of the new-born Christ...
...On Sunday, show day, they had it all removed and reduced to bare flats...
...Then he went out to Princeton, New Jersey, and listened to some boys in a group called the Columbus Boys-choir...
...Gone are the musical interludes which were written to cover scene changes in old opera houses...
...It has a trio that sings of how wonderful life is in the suburbs, and a man and wife (the only other characters) who are living there in utter misery...
...On television, it was truly delightful...
...It was three years ago when Samuel Chotzinoff, the National Broadcasting Company's music director, commissioned Menotti to write the first opera specifically for television...
Vol. 17 • January 1953 • No. 1
