Unblessed by the Met

Only two U.S. operas have been produced at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House in the past eight years; both were written by the same man. Yet 34-year-old, Italian-born Gian-Carlo Menotti, the composer, is no admirer of the Met.

His Amelia Goes to the Ball (1938) and The Island God (1942) got fair to middling notices, but they did not stay long in the Met's repertory.* Says Menotti: "Opera should be taken out of the museum. The trouble with opera isn't that it isn't what it used to be, but that it is."

Last week Composer Menotti had a premiere to his liking. His latest music-drama, The Medium, was produced under his own direction by Columbia University. On a set by Ballet Designer Oliver Smith, The Medium unfolded a grisly plot thick in horror and thin in music.

It tells the story of a phony spiritualist who, in the midst of a seance she has rigged, finds a cold hand clutching at her throat. The audience never finds out if her assailant is mortal or ectoplasmic, but it sees a first-rate flagellation and a ghostly murder before the curtain rings down. Every word of Menotti's English libretto had the merit of being understandable, and some of the atmospheric horror music was more blood-curdling than Puccini's.

But the best performance last week was that of a mute who didn't sing a note. This week Menotti's seven-year-old opera bouffe, The Old Maid and the Thief (TIME, May 1, 1939) is to be sung to beer and hot dogs at a Carnegie Hall pop concert. Next month, Menotti will sail for Europe to visit Milan, his home town, and do research in Paris for a ballet about Marcel Proust. He lives at Mt. Kisco, N.Y. in a glistening glass and wood house called "Capricorn," with Symphonist Samuel Barber, an aspiring poet named Robert Horan, and a female cocker spaniel. The cocker, Menotti says, "is very musical and neurotic like all of us in the house." The dog has a preference for the works of Ravel and Debussy.

* Of the 1 8 U.S. operas produced by the Met, only Deems Taylor's The King's Henchman (1927) and Peter Ibbetson (1931), and Louis Gruenberg's Emperor Jones (1933) were mild successes. The last pre-Menotti U.S. opera was Walter Damrosch's The Man without a Country, which got one performance, May 12, 1937.

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