Only two U.S. operas have been produced at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House in the past eight years; both were written by the same man. Yet 34-year-old, Italian-born Gian-Carlo Menotti, the composer, is no admirer of the Met.
His Amelia Goes to the Ball (1938) and The Island God (1942) got fair to middling notices, but they did not stay long in the Met's repertory.* Says Menotti: "Opera should be taken out of the museum. The trouble with opera isn't that it isn't what it used to be, but that it is."
Last week Composer...
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