Living Children

By William Bender

Gian Carlo Menotti scribbled away at arias and orchestrations right up to the final dress rehearsal. So did the copyists. Despite the furious round-the-clock push, the official first night of The Most Important Man at the New York City Opera had to be set back six days. Said a weary Menotti: "It will kill me one day. I'll have a heart attack, I know it."

All the activity, including the fatalistic rhetoric, is by and large a familiar libretto at any Menotti premiere. For he is the owner of one of the most monumental writer's blocks in operatic history. In 1951, for example, he was so desperate to get out of a commissioned job from NBC television that he offered to give back his $5,000 fee. "Nothing doing," said NBC, and Menotti eventually came up with that bright and sturdy Christmas evergreen, Amahl and the Night Visitors. All told, Menotti has been cornered by circumstances enough times to produce a larger number of effective popular operas than any composer since Puccini and Strauss.

For The Most Important Man, Menotti has turned out music that follows the pleasant, well-traveled road of early 20th century Italian opera. His story is a simplistic, easy-to-follow tale of blacks v. whites. In a contemporary "white state" in Africa, a young black scientist, Toime Ukamba (Baritone Eugene Holmes), makes a discovery--happily undisclosed in the libretto--that will not only be beneficial to all mankind but will make the country that possesses it the most powerful in the world. The rulers of the state are something less than thrilled that a black has become their "most important man," and Toime soon finds himself in bitter--and ultimately fatal--conflict with the white community.

No Masks. None of the characters are very believable, even by opera's standards. Menotti's style, as always, is symbolic verismo, and his principal theme in The Most Important Man is that whites, despite frequent good intentions, are unable to live up to their promises to blacks. "We have made the gesture, but we have not accepted blacks emotionally," Menotti explains. Musically, The Most Important Man is blatantly eclectic. Strains of Richard Strauss float from the pit during one interlude. By the final duet between Toime and his white girl friend Cora (Soprano Joanna Bruno), Menotti is unashamedly into the heart-throbbing lyricism of Puccini. Much less original than his 1950 Broadway success The Consul, or even his recent and endearing children's opera Help! Help! The Globolinks, the new opera hardly represents a step forward for Menotti. Yet its smooth orchestrations--notably a deft use of African rhythms in Act II--and easy-to-take arias could well make it a favorite with many Menotti fans.

Being old-fashioned has never bothered Menotti any more than the complaints of avant-garde critics who consistently patronize him. He is what he is, and proud of it. "In art, there is no use wearing masks," he says. Among the fashionable masks he refuses to wear is that of twelve-tone music. Like England's Benjamin Britten, Menotti is well aware that after 50 or more years, serialism and atonality have never become a common "spoken" language. He doubts that they ever will. "Atonal music," he says flatly, "is essentially pessimistic. It is incapable of expressing joy or humor." Menotti is correct about the joylessness of atonality. What he has failed to detect is the vast freedom that atonality has given certain contemporary composers who care about exploring the anxious mind and soul of modern man.

Still, Menotti has already played a decisive historical role in contemporary opera. His success with The Medium (1946) and The Telephone (1947), for example, may or may not have had an influence on such subsequent works as Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress (1951) and Poulenc's La Voix Humaine (1958), but they clearly helped create an audience for contemporary opera.

That does not mean that Menotti has already been consigned to history. Upwards of a thousand performances of his 13 operas are given every year. Says Menotti: "All I can say about my operas is that I have no dead children, which is the most a composer can hope for. I know I am alone in my road. I don't meet many critics or colleagues there--just people, which is very pleasant." . William Bender

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