Gian Carlo Menotti

Gian Carlo Menotti (1911–2007) was an Italian-American composer who, more than any twentieth-century figure, kept opera alive as a popular American art form. Born in Cadegliano in northern Italy, he was the sixth of ten children and began composing songs at age four. After his father's death his mother brought him to study at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia in 1928, where he met fellow student Samuel Barber, who became his lifelong companion and intellectual partner.

Menotti wrote his own librettos in English and worked in a directly tonal idiom at a moment when serialism dominated academic music. His one-act thrillers The Medium (1946) and The Telephone (1947) ran on Broadway, and The Consul (1950), about a woman trapped in an unnamed police state, won the Pulitzer Prize for Music.

His most lasting work is Amahl and the Night Visitors, commissioned by NBC and broadcast on Christmas Eve 1951 as the first opera written for American television. The story of a crippled shepherd boy who meets the Magi has been performed every Christmas season since by churches, schools, and opera companies.

In 1958 he founded the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy, an annual gathering of music, dance, and theater that drew young American performers to Umbria each summer. He extended the festival to Charleston, South Carolina in 1977 as Spoleto Festival USA, and later to Melbourne. The Saint of Bleecker Street brought him a second Pulitzer in 1955.

The name Gian Carlo joins Italian forms of John ("God is gracious") and Charles ("free man"). He was a free man who sang of grace.