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"Do You Promise Me?" By the time he was 16, Gian-Carlo had composed two operas and finished five years of ginnasio and a year and a half of liceo in Milan—"the usual European classical education, a great bore." Far from a bore for him were the family's jaunts to their box at La Scala to hear Toscanini conduct opera.
Gian-Carlo's musical talent was making him something of a problem child, known as "I'enfant prodige" around Milanese salons. His mother put an end to that. Father Menotti had died, so she packed Gian-Carlo off to Colombia with her to settle her husband's affairs. On the way back to Italy, she stopped in New York, and asked Tullio Serafin, then a top conductor at the Metropolitan, what she should do with her talented but untempered son. The next thing Gian-Carlo knew, he had been plunked down before Composition Teacher Rosario Scalero at Philadelphia's Curtis Institute of Music. He knew hardly a word of English.
Recalls Teacher Scalero, now 79, retired and living in Italy: "The boy had some stuff in him, but he was most undisciplined and raw." Fixing him with a stern eye, he said, "GianCarlo, if I am to teach you, we must come to an agreement, you and I. I promise you that I will be uncompromisingly severe. Do you promise me to put in some very hard work, something you have never done before?" Gian-Carlo promised. And, says Scalero, "he abided by his agreement." Thanks to Scalero's perseverance in making him compose simple motets (polyphonic choral works), Menotti is now a master at writing canons (the complicated, contrapuntal version of what children sing in "rounds" such as Row, Row, Row Your Boat), and they continually show up in his operas in clever trios, quartets, and quintets.
At Curtis, Gian-Carlo Menotti met another young composition student named Samuel Barber who, luckily for Gian-Carlo, had studied Italian. Sam's mother,
Mrs. S. Leroy Barber, who does not speak Italian, recalls Gian-Carlo's first visit to their West Chester, Pa. home. They could only stare at each other when Sam was out of the room. Finally, when it became time to leave, Mrs. Barber recalls, Gian-Carlo shook her hand warmly and tried to explain: "I have many thinks but few words."
Faith In Faith. Since those days, Gian-Carlo has had both "many thinks" and many words. Not a few of them have gone into his operas. He put his concern with faith into The Medium; he was raised a Roman Catholic, and although he says he has lost his religious faith, "I have not lost faith in faith." In The Consul his thesis is "To this we've come; that men withhold the world from men . . ."
Menotti, still an Italian citizen, often stammers in his native language, but after 20 years in the U.S., his English is unfaltering and fluent. When he sits down to work his ideas into words & music, he finds that suggestions for both generally occur to him simultaneously. The result, as in his heroine's second-act aria in The Consul, is not only moving music but clean, singable English:
What is your name? Magda Sorel.
Age? Thirty-three.
What does that matter? . .
What is your name?
What is your name?
What is your name?
This is my answer: my name is woman.