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It had also won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for the year's best "musical" (opera was still considered too strong a word for Broadway; The Consul was billed as a "musical drama"). Decca Records was recording it with the original cast, and Hollywood was shouting offers, none of which seemed to be of much interest to 38-year-old Composer Menotti. What pleased him considerably more was that Milan's La Scala, which snooted his first five operas, had asked permission to produce The Consul in Italian late this year. Menotti felt hopeful that his acceptance by La Scala, at long last, might even persuade his family back in Italy that he amounted to something. Wails Menotti: "I keep telling them I am famous in America, famous! They just look at me sympathetically."
The Met Habit. A modest man, Menotti would be the last to claim preeminence as an operatic composer at work in a world which includes Sergei Prokofiev and Igor Stravinsky. But even his relations in Italy might yet have to admit that he is the most successful at work in the U.S.
Yet he has no apparent interest whatever in working his way from Broadway to the U.S.'s opera citadel, the Metropolitan. For one thing he had his fling at the Met before Broadway. His first opera, Amelia Goes to the Ball, composed when he was 25, was played for two seasons (seven performances) by the Met, and his third, The Island God, a flop, had four performances. He recalls the Met's productions with distaste: "For The Island God they dragged on some rocks that looked like the third act of Die Walkure." The Met's huge stage, ceremonial trappings and big voices demand a grander canvas than Menotti now chooses to paint his tight little operas on. Moreover, the Met audience, to him, is "not an audience but a habit."
Death & Tears. Menotti is an operatic one-man show who writes his own librettos and his own music, then stages and directs the whole production as well. He has been doing that sort of thing since he was eleven.
The youthful Gian-Carlo ("a beautiful child until my nose began to grow") first thought of becoming a composer when he was six; he remembers setting "the most erotic verses of D'Annunzio to angelic little tunes." It was a marionette theater, which his mother gave him when he was nine, that decided his course. Before long, he was pulling the strings of 50 puppets, making all the costumes and inventing all the stories—most of them about dragons, princesses, ogres and death. "We Italians are clowns in a way," he says in softly accented English, "but fundamentally we are a vaaary glooomy race. It is death, death, tragedy and tears all the time."
He was the ninth child of a father who made a fortune in the import-export business in South America, then returned to his pink villa in the little town of Cadegliano overlooking Lake Lugano to settle down to the quiet life. Gian-Carlo's mother, a dynamic woman who took up painting at 60, the guitar at 62, was the main influence in his life. An artistic woman herself, she sought out talent among all of her children, especially lavished her attention on little Gian-Carlo, who seemed to have the most.