Opera Allsorts

Opera AllsortsAMAHL AND THE NIGHT VISITORS

A mix of tidbits and tales about Menotti's holiday classic

INSPIRED BY THE GIFT OF ART

In 1951, Peter Herman Adler, NBC’s director of new opera programming commissioned composer and librettist Gian Carlo Menotti to write the first opera for television. Struggling to find a subject for the new opera, Menotti was inspired by the distant blue hills of Hieronymus Bosch’s painting The Adoration of the Magi while visiting New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Amahl and the Night Visitors was the result. Menotti considered this inspiration to be his gift from the three Magi in the painting.

The original broadcast of the opera is available on YouTube.

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HIERONYMUS BOSCH’S THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI

WON’T YOU BE MY OPERA?

The floor manager on the original 1951 NBC broadcast of Amahl and the Night Visitors was a 23-year-old recent college graduate by the name of Fred Rogers. Mister Rogers, as he would come to be known, would go on to stage several short operas during the run of his prolific children’s television show.

FRED ROGERS ON THE SET OF 'MISTER ROGERS' NEIGHBORHOOD.'

STILL FROM NBC'S 1963 PRODUCTION OF AMAHL AND THE NIGHT VISITORS

THE PROHIBITED PRODUCTION

Since its debut in 1951, Amahl and the Night Visitors was restaged with much of the same cast and crew and broadcast live each Christmas season for over a decade. In 1963, NBC recorded one final production of the opera, for the first time on videotape. It featured an all-new cast, but composer and librettist Gian Carlo Menotti wasn’t available to attend the taping. NBC went ahead without him, enraging Menotti, who refused to allow it to be rebroadcast after 1965. A record of the cast from this production was released—also a first to be recorded in stereo—and this production can now be watched on YouTube.

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A CELEBRATED COMPOSER

Not only did Menotti compose the very first opera for television, he also won two Pulitzer Prizes in five years: first, for his opera The Consul in 1950, and subsequently for The Saint of Bleecker Street in 1954. He wrote his very first opera The Death of Pierrot by the age of 11 and kept his Italian citizenship even though he emigrated to the United States during the 1920s and produced a significant body of work there.

GIAN CARLO MENOTTI, 1956. PHOTO BY YOUSUF KARSH.