An Opera for Today
McDaniel, Charles-Gene
Menotti's "opera for the whole world" is art devoted to a noble human cause An Opera for Today CHARLES-GENE McDANIEL Gian Carlo Menotti's latest opera, Tamu-Tamu, is as contemporary and...
...The story is set in the smart American high-rise apartment of a young couple and opens with a mild early-morning spat as the husband prepares his own breakfast...
...The work was commissioned by the IXth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, which was meeting in Chicago at the time of the premiere...
...It had its world premiere last fall in Chicago in the Studebaker Theater, a house seating 1,200, just the right size for a work of this scope...
...While the work, called by the composer "an opera for the whole world," has an Indonesian title and some Indonesian lyrics, Menotti noted that "it is no more Indonesian than Madame Butterfly is Japanese or Don Giovanni is Spanish...
...Somewhat in the manner of Amahl, the gripping moments are interspersed with quiet interludes...
...The audience sees the photograph blown up and projected on a scrim at the back of the stage...
...It's not a tune one can hum, but it's not an opera one wants to forget...
...Then she calls her doctor, assures him she is not "fantasizing" again, and urges him to come to the apartment...
...The family also includes the grandmother, a little girl, and a young man and his two wives, one of them at the end of her term of pregnancy...
...The music is neither avant garde nor strictly traditional...
...She is in the final throes when the curtain falls on the first act, and she is cradling her newborn when the curtain rises for the second of the opera's two acts...
...In an interview in advance of the opening, he told me that the opera was intended to mirror "the conflict between two different civilizations...
...Tamu-Tamu is among his better works...
...The American husband is intrigued by the bare breasts of the second Indonesian wife...
...Perhaps those who did not like Tamu-Tamu really did not like it because Menotti appealed to their emotions and evoked feelings of guilt and shame growing out of their comfortable affluent existences, isolated from the horrors of war and poverty...
...He is best known for Amahl and the Night Visitors, his lovely Christmas fable...
...The husband dashes off to work again, and the wife vacuums up the table crumbs...
...The plaintive quality I find appealing in Amahl is also present in Tamu-Tamu, but because of the overwhelming tragedy of the latter this plaintive-ness is counterpointed by heavy percussion...
...Critics in other cities should be more understanding if not kinder than those in Chicago...
...His own wife's jealousy is exacerbated when the young Indonesian girl gives him a back massage to relieve his headache...
...The American wife takes care of the boy's wounds and frantically telephones her husband to come home and fetch rice on the way...
...It is, indeed, about today...
...At times the opera is also tender and sweet...
...Menotti's "opera for the whole world" is art devoted to a noble human cause An Opera for Today CHARLES-GENE McDANIEL Gian Carlo Menotti's latest opera, Tamu-Tamu, is as contemporary and disturbing as today...
...There is a knock at the door, and she opens it for Menotti's shocking surprise...
...In another moving scene, the pregnant Indonesian wife goes into labor and continues in the Oriental sitting position on the floor while the two other Indonesian women massage her body to assist her labor...
...The besieged family from the newspaper photograph is there, pleading for help...
...It was probably the first commissioned opera since the Egyptian government commissioned Verdi to compose Aida for the opening of the Suez Canal a century ago...
...Serving (as usual) as his own librettist, Menotti achieves a moving excitement in the tension of the story and the music, which are well suited to each other...
...the child does not understand the words, but the spirit is communicated and she goes to sleep...
...During the uneasy forced accommodation, conflicts are mirrored...
...And, as Menotti said in the interview, it Charles-Gene McDaniel is a free lance writer based in Chicago...
...the little things that become so important in cultures and that prevent cultural amalgamation are highlighted...
...A chamber opera calling for only seven singers and eight other parts, Tamu-Tamu lasts only about seventy-five minutes, so the conflict is compactly and tersely related in the tightly knit libretto and score...
...A boy in the family has been wounded and is bleeding...
...The tension of the confrontation, however, is present...
...The composer said he particularly welcomed the commission for the scientific congress because of his long-held belief that "music should be taken out of the connoisseurs' hot houses and brought back into the open air...
...The wife enters in a wrapper, bored and hung over from the night before...
...She admits them, hungry, in dirty tatters, with meager belongings, a counterpoint to the modern American apartment...
...Menotti kept the story secret until the opera opened, in order, he said, that the surprises would be surprises...
...There's nothing more moving than an art which devotes itself to a noble human cause and nothing more challenging for an artist than to feel needed within a social structure...
...But at the end, the lives of the young Americans seem untouched...
...Sol Tax, president of the scientific congress, telephoned and asked him if he would compose an opera for the occasion...
...Many Cultures," and in preparation of Tamu-Tamu Menotti consulted with Tax, a University of Chicago anthropologist, and Margaret Mead, congress chairperson...
...A Christmas tree with gifts beneath it sits in a corner of the room, and outside a blizzard is beginning...
...And he has given us The Medium, The Telephone, The Consul, and The Saint of Bleecker Street...
...So unusual is such a commission that Menotti said he "frankly thought it was a joke" when Dr...
...The theme of the congress was "One Species...
...he says it is a case for the police and flees in disgust...
...Throughout, communication is hampered because the guests do not speak English, except for the little spoken by the bare-breasted wife...
...A critic for one of the four Chicago newspapers entirely missed the point of the work...
...It shows an Oriental family being attacked by a band of Oriental soldiers...
...The doctor comes but refuses to treat the boy...
...The blizzard knocks out the telephone—that prop of American civilization—so the couple cannot get anyone else to come to help...
...The first-night audience was enthusiastic, but the critics, for the most part, were not...
...The old man dies and his Indonesian family prepares his body...
...There are also tender moments and genuine sharing...
...Tamu-Tamu" is Indonesian for "guests," and its brief but poignant story is about the conflict between two cultures—Oriental and American...
...Buddhist priests enter and bear his body away toward a temple silhouetted against the back wall...
...A grandfather is dying and his pallet is laid on the floor, while the boy is placed on the couch...
...The American wife holds the little Indonesian girl and sings a touching lullaby...
...The four Oriental principals in the cast, who are assigned the most difficult vocal lines, sing an exquisite and deeply touching dirge as they go through the death ritual...
...also was a historical event because "as far as I know it is the first time a group of scientists have commissioned an opera...
...he interpreted it as an outdated antiwar opera, but the story is only peripherally about war...
...The process of feeling is a very painful one...
...Tamu-Tamu deserves a wide exposure, largely for its ideas but also for its music...
...The opera reaches a horrifying climax when the soldiers who had attacked the family in the photograph make a surprising entry and murder the guests before the eyes of the American hosts and the audience...
...The tension is not jarring, because it seems to build and develop naturally, and the music is easy to listen to...
...Because of the excess of today's horrors, there is a marked tendency in our generation, either through drugs or self-imposed indifference, to avoid it...
...The husband leaves, and the wife begins to vacuum up the crumbs around the table where he had eaten...
...Strains of Silent Night are heard in the music...
...The two families settle down together for a while...
...Even the peaceful death of the grandfather early in the opera has a calming effect in its dignity...
...All our musical life has been too much confined to musical institutions rather than being part of our daily life...
...The husband arrives, bearing "instant" rice, and is shocked and disturbed at the invasion of his apartment by people undesirable to him...
...Menotti has woven Oriental themes into the music, melding the score and the libretto in a way the two cultures could not be...
...Then she and the American wife go offstage to exchange costumes, and both husbands are upset when they return...
...The husband is horrified by a picture he sees on the front page of the morning newspaper and shares his horror with his wife...
...In an article in The New York Times following the opera's run in Chicago, Menotti stated his case for using a socially relevant theme for his work: "It is difficult for an artist today not to feel that his contributions are marginal or superfluous to a social pattern that relegates him to the field of entertainment...
...Menotti, who was bora in Italy but educated in the United States, is the outstanding American operatic composer...
...Menotti has not felt compelled to "move music forward," and hence it is not fashionable for some critics to like his work...
...And the Indonesians are shocked when the two Americans kiss passionately in their presence...
...In this he succeeds...
...To an outsider, the opera was the most significant achievement of that congress, which was marked by third-rate science...
Vol. 38 • January 1974 • No. 1
