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Age: still young.
Color of hair: grey.
Color of eyes: the color of tears.
Occupation: waiting, waiting, waiting.
Since his experiences with the Metropolitan, Menotti has always insisted on doing his own staging and directing. ("As stage director I am always faithful to the composer.") In Cowles and Zimbalist,
Menotti has two producers who leave him strictly to his own devices. These include an unblushing use of dramatic tricks such as spooky seances, shattering windowpanes, hypnotism, magicians, eerie dream dances.
A Form of Remembrance. The music that goes with all this is in turn sentimental, sophisticated, stark and powerful, and always apt and unpretentious. Even when it consists of ordinary material, it is always well made.
At heart, Menotti is a melodic composer for whom "melody is a form of remembrance ... it must have a quality of inevitability in our ears." His arias come to him easily, his long recitatives more painfully. "The hardest work I do," he says, "is on the little musical phrases in the recitatives that no one but a few astute musicians hear." He has made a lilting, hurdy-gurdyish ¾rhythm, among other musical devices, particularly his own.
He has most often been likened to Puccini. Bar for bar, he bears scant resemblance, but Menotti's tender and romantic passages in particular come to the ear with something of Puccini's melodramatic appeal. Actually, Menotti says that Mussorgsky has been more his model; he has obviously learned from both Debussy and Prokofiev, too. He seldom strays far from traditional tonality, although he often uses sharp or strong dissonance for effect.
In a day of cream-puffy orchestration, Menotti uses his small orchestra with repression. Orchestration, as such, does not interest him: "I do it as fast as possible, and that's that," he says. "What interests me is the human animal up there on the stage singing."
With this preoccupation, he has brought a new kind of singing actress to the fore. Menotti singers such as Marie Powers and his latest discovery, tall, dark-eyed, Brooklyn-born Patricia Neway, 27, the star of The Consul, may be vocally a step below the Met; dramatically they are well above it.
Not One Note. When he is not jumping from desk chair to piano bench composing his operas, Menotti occasionally likes to try some dramatics himself. Sociable, voluble, and almost childishly concerned and curious about other people ("He has the soul of a concierge," says Cowles), he loves to pack his roomy, rambling house in Mt. Kisco, N.Y. with weekend guests. On such occasions, they often play "The Game"—charades. Says Cowles: "Menotti is a very hammy actor, and he always insists on making all the rules."
He works "consistently"—that is, all day. But he is too restless to work more than ten minutes at a time. "I telephone someone, walk around or something. I like to break it up, come back to what I have written as something new and fresh." He does not have to worry about neighbors overhearing him at work. He and his partners in the eight-room Mt. Kisco place, who include Composer Sam Barber and Poet Robert Horan, now own 70 acres of hilly, wooded land surrounding the house.