When Gian Carlo Menotti took over the cobbled Umbrian city of Spoleto in 1958 for his first Festival of Two Worlds, the musical fringe of Manhattan’s cocktail circuit followed him and introduced the martini to local opera buffs. Italian bluebloods rapidly caught on, and musica é martini dry became the order of the day.
Eight festivals later, Menotti’s show has become a way of life. Nobody (who is anybody) comes out for a day or a single event; one settles in for a week or the whole four-week season. “Once you get here, it’s impossible to leave,” says Countess Alice Spaulding Paolozzi, whose daughter Cristina gave the whole family a certain notoriety by posing nude and chest-high for Harper’s Bazaar. Contessa Wally Castelbarco, Toscanini’s daughter, “wouldn’t miss it for anything,” and presides over Gian Carlo’s elegant collection of rival hostesses who yearn to be his hostesses during the season.
Concerts & Cannelloni. Last week Spoleto was swinging with the usual galaxy of aristocrats, film stars and jet set. The earnest and the merely cultured rapidly settled into the ritual of their daily rounds: breakfast at 10, a midday chamber concert, a five-o’clock poetry reading and then a play at the Seven O’Clock Theater. Ballet or opera was the choice of enchantments for the evening—Choreographer John Cranko’s intensely dramatic Romeo and Juliet, the swirling color of Yugoslav folk dances, or Conductor Thomas Schippers’ sonorous rendition of Verdi’s Otello.
The habitué follows a more calculatedly relaxed schedule: a noontime apéritif in the sun-drenched Piazza del Duomo, where one was sure to see George Balanchine and the Maharani of Jaipur. Or late lunch in the Trattoria Panciolle, followed by a long siesta. The music of pianos, violins and vocalizing floats out of narrow Renaissance windows; artists and audience are on first-name terms within hours. After dusk, international jet setters in white dinner jackets brush shoulders with gaping locals in sweatshirts at the superheated discothéque. Then it is on to a 16th century vaulted cellar that serves cannelloni till dawn.
Everybody’s Grandfather. The really In do not feel sure they are really in until they have spent an evening or part of it at Menotti’s 17th century palazzo. Marvels Menotti: “I am regularly faced by an avalanche of princes, princesses, dukes and duchesses, who swarm over my house in their wonderful clothes, eating, drinking and cooking spaghetti in my kitchen. Spoleto was conceived as a small ivory turret, but has turned into a Tower of Babel.”
Menotti’s ivory turret has been swarmed over by some 200,000 visitors this season. A major draw has been the poetry readings, which have attracted such diverse types as Russia’s Evtushenko, Britain’s Stephen Spender, and that U.S. patron of the beat, Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Capstone of this year’s festival was Ezra Pound, who emerged from his self-imposed, seven-year confinement in a small apartment in Venice to read his poetry. Pound was so charmed by his warm ovation at Spoleto that he refused to go home. “He moved into my palace, walks around town all day, attends every performance and rehearsal, and has nearly supplanted me as King of Spoleto,” says Menotti. “He has become everybody’s grandfather—just like Father Christmas.”
The only shadow that hangs over the festival is its reputation as a haven for homosexuals, though the flutelike piping of high-pitched voices has lessened over the years. Nevertheless Menotti staunchly maintains: “God forbid that we should look into the sexual habits of the participants of an artistic organization. I refuse to test the healthiness of my festival with a moral thermometer.”
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