De Morte et Conscientia

To Gian Carlo Menotti, death is the moment of the enlightenment that makes life worthwhile. In Labyrinth, his last television opera, he dwelt on the idea to the point of moral vertigo. If life is a grand hotel, he seemed to be saying, then death is its night clerk. Those who want keys to their rooms must die to get them.

Now, in a new dramatic cantata called The Death of the Bishop of Brindisi, Menotti makes the same point with fresh power and beauty. In its premiere in Cincinnati's Music Hall, his music won him an ovation greater than any in his long career. Scored for full orchestra, two soloists, and a chorus of 525, the cantata had 325 children onstage and everybody's mother in the audience. But Brindisi would have been a triumph anywhere.

Menotti's story is told in searing memories that come to the bishop in his deathbed. Having blessed the children who set sail from Brindisi on the way to their deaths in the Children's Crusade, he torments himself with recriminations. "What faith, what love, can justify the man who makes himself the arbiter of other people's lives?" he pleads--but the chorus gives him no answer. The children's innocent voices haunt him. The adult chorus damns him: "Cursed be the shepherd who leads his flock to death," the people cry, and they burn his books, stone his palace, cast his ring into the sea. Then the blinding answer comes in a climactic sweep of music: death's enriching lesson comes only to those who have suffered the pain of their conscience.

Onstage, the adult choristers applauded while the children cheered and wept. Said Menotti, seized for a change with the delights of life: "Nothing like this has ever happened to me before. I want the final chorus sung at my funeral."

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