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....
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