Gian carlo menotti composer stravinsky

It’s not as if Gian Carlo Menotti sat down one day and said, “I think I’ll invent a new genre today.” Yet with the composition of Amahl and the Night Visitors in 1951, that is essentially what he did.

Almost unwittingly, the Italian-born American created what has come to be considered the first opera composed for television.

Gian carlo menotti composer stravinsky

Although he himself might not have seen it as a huge milestone initially, the 45-minute telecast established a tradition of “television opera” that has continued, in one form or another, to the present day.

Opera had, of course, been a part of television since its earliest days, just as it formed part of radio’s beginnings.

By the mid-1930s, the BBC and other European networks were including operas (or portions of operas) in their transmissions, and in 1940 NBC presented an abridged version of Pagliacci. But Amahl established something entirely different: opera composed specifically for television.

And although it and many of its successors were later