Menotti's Latest

By curtain time on opening night in Brussels, almost everything connected with the new opera seemed to have gone wrong. Less than a month before, Composer-Librettist-Director Gian Carlo Menotti was still frantically writing Act III when he put Act I into rehearsal. In the last hours he found that the orchestra pit in the U.S. Pavilion's theater looked all wrong, ordered it repainted dark brown. Belgium's Queen Elisabeth arrived for the premiere, had to be placed in a niche originally designed for spotlights, since the American theater had nothing like a royal box. About one-third of the invited VIP audience did not bother to come.

But the real trouble was the show itself. Maria Golovin, Menotti's first opera score since The Saint of Bleecker Street (1954) and his third commissioned by NBC was the only new musical work of any importance unveiled at the Brussels fair. It was a disappointment.

Set in "a villa near a frontier in a European country," Maria Golovin unfolds a romance between Maria, whose husband is a war prisoner abroad, and Donato, a returned soldier blinded in the (undated) war. Donato at first seeks mere companionship with Maria. He sings: "May I touch your face? My touch is as harmless as a glance." But within a month they are lovers. Blinded further by jealousy, Donato visualizes imagined rivals. "When I had my eyes, I could close them and find peace. Now I imagine things. I see things." His love turns into hate, first suicidal, then homicidal. In the final scene, after Maria's husband has returned, Donato's mother motions Maria out of harm's way, aims the pistol in Donato's hand at a blank wall and sings: "Yes. my son, kill her!" Donato fires. Horrified but unharmed, Maria remains silent. As Donato and his mother leave to seek sanctuary across the frontier, the mother sings: "She is yours forever now . .. You're free."

Cabled a TIME correspondent from the Brussels opening: "The audience applauded mightily, but the work had moments rather than momentum. The music consisted of only a few themes linked by weak chains. One motif--that of romantic love--was warm, sweet and haunting. And occasionally voices rose in skillful counterpoint. There were echoes of Puccini--one was tempted, as a Belgian critic put it, to shout at Menotti: 'All right then, simply sing like Puccini!'

"By and large, the libretto was banal. Amid rare lyrical oases were arid stretches sounding as though Menotti's notions about love were being used to teach his Ruritanians basic English. Incidents of little significance were treated as moments of high drama. When the cook announced that her culinary specialty 'has not risen to the occasion,' the music shifted into crescendo furor. There was plenty of theatricality, but much less real theater. By the time Menotti came to the end of his third act, he was faced with the eternal creative problem--how to sign and sing off. Instead of boldness, he chose a nicely cathartic murder in which nobody suffered real pain."

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