The Music Plays On — Menotti Amahl and the Night Visitors
It is hard to imagine a world in which there were only a few television stations to choose for your at-home entertainment. Harder still to imagine one of those stations commissioning a living American composer to write an opera to be premiered and performed live on national television on Christmas Eve. Yet, such was the case for the Italian-American composer, Gian Carlo Menotti, and his opera, Amahl and the Night Visitors.
For the debut broadcast of NBC’s Hallmark Hall of Fame Holiday Special, Menotti was asked by Peter Herman Adler, the director of NBC’s newly formed NBC Opera Theater (yes, NBC had an opera theater company) to write an opera written specifically for television, and for an American audience. Menotti took his inspiration from Hieronymus Bosch’s The Adoration of the Magi that still hangs in The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
As the date of the broadcast neared, Menotti had yet to finish the score and the singers learned the music peacemeal, as Menotti sent the final passages of the opera just days before the premiere. Menotti’s partner, the composer Samuel Barber was brought in to orchestrate the music and the conductor was the young and…
