Born On This Day- July 7th... Gian Carlo Menotti

I should be tossing this out for my friend Will in New Hampshire who is a designer, librettist & opera historian.

Gian Carlo Menotti was an Italian-born American composer & librettist who wrote the classic Christmas opera- Amahl & The Night Visitors among 24 other operas intended to appeal to popular taste. He won 2 Pulitzer Prizes: The Consul (1950) & The Saint of Bleecker Street (1955).

He was born 100 years ago today in Italy. Menotti began writing songs when he was 7 years old. When he was 11 years old, he wrote both the libretto & music for his first opera & started his formal musical training at Milan's Verdi Conservatory in 1923.

After the death of his father, Menotti & his mother immigrated to the USA, & he enrolled at Philadelphia's Curtis Institute of Music. His classmates included Leonard Bernstein & Samuel Barber who became Menotti's partner in life & in work.


In 1958, he founded the Festival of 2 Worlds in Spoleto, Italy; he founded its companion festival in Charleston, South Carolina in 1977. For 3 weeks each summer, Spoleto is visited by nearly a half-million people. These festivals were intended to bring opera to a popular audience & helped launch the careers of young artists including choreographers Twyla Tharp & Paul Taylor. He left Spoleto USA in 1993 to take the helm of the Rome Opera.

In 1984 Menotti was awarded the Kennedy Center Honor for achievement in the arts. In addition to composing his own work, on themes of his choosing, he also wrote the libretto, cast & directed his own productions.

Menotti died on February 1, 2007 at the age of 95 in a hospital in Monaco, where he had a home. He announced that it would be 'naughty' to die in Monte Carlo.

Born On This Day- May 17th... Composer Alfred Éric Leslie Satie

In the early autumn of 1976, I had a brief, but very intense affair with a still world famous classical guitarist. A class act, he spirited me away from NYC to Cape Cod for 3 days of hot sex, guitar breaks, food & wine, & more hot sex. During our rest periods he would play for me. One of the compositions that really struck me & made me temporarily forget his other gifts, was Erik Satie's Gymnopodie #1. This piece was written for piano & the arrangement for guitar was by my new buddy. I still listen to his recording of it & I can remember the salt air, & the sweat from our extended weekend.

Dadaist, absurdest French composer & pianist Erik Satie, was contemporary of Ravel & Debussy. he collaborated with Jean Cocteau to create the ballet Parade (1917) for the Ballet Russes, with set designs by Pablo Picasso . He knew, worked with or influenced most of the artists,  writers & musicians in Paris when it was the cultural capital of the world. He is credited with nearly every avant-garde movement of the 20th century.Satie was  influential in the fields of minimalism & ambient music,&  the use of piano music-to-film synchronisation.

Satie referred to himself as a "phonometrician" (meaning someone who measures sounds) preferring this designation to that of "musician", after having been called "a clumsy but subtle technician" in a book on contemporary French composers published in 1911.

In addition to his body of music, Satie also left a remarkable set of writings, having contributed work for a range of publications, from the Dada 391 to the American culture chronicle- Vanity Fair.

Satie was an incredibly private & eccentric man. He was known to enter a room & sit without removing his hat, coat or gloves, & always with a brand new umbrella.

After his funeral 1925, his friends entered the tiny room he had occupied for 27 years but had never allowed anyone else to enter. Along with dust & cobwebs, they found huge quantities of umbrellas, many never used, as well as large numbers of unknown compositions hidden all over the room.