By JOHN ARDOIN

Do you remember Gian Cado Menotti’s touching madrigal ballet The Unicorn, the Gorgon, and the Manticore? I ask, because it sadly seems to have fallen out of fashion. At least I haven’t encountered a performance or recording of it for quite a while. What a shame, for beyond its beauties of line, wit, and texture, it has symbolic qualities especially appropriate as Menotti enters his 80th year.

He wrote it in 1956 when he was 45. It is a wistful meditation on a poet’s passage from youth (the unicorn) to middle age (the gorgon) to old age (the manticore). At the time he composed it, Menotti was gently looking back at his yesterdays, musing on his today, and anticipating his tomorrow.

But with the perspective of an additional 34 years, those of us who know and love him and his music are suddenly caught short by the remarkable awareness that, as July 7 approaches, it will be the unicorn whose birthday we will celebrate. The gorgon and the manticore are still standing idly by in the wings. The man and the composer we know as Menotti might once have contemplated middle or old age, but these were roles he was not cut out to portray. It is not just that he doesn’t look the parts; he is emotionally incapable of playing them.

Oh yes, he tries, when the need arises, but convinces no one. He will attempt to look weary and lament, “But bambino, don’t you realize that I’m an old, old man?” But as Francis Rizzo, a former assistant, has pointed out, “It’s just a trick, of course, to have his way more easily, or get out of something he’d just as soon avoid. And once it works, he throws aside his beard and staff and runs back happily to play with all the other children.” If Menotti has found a fountain of youth, it resides in his optimism and curiosity, a childlike belief in miracles, a still strong need to question and discover, a love of the irreverent, and a willingness to commit himself to what he feels, without premeditation or apologies.

The world knows him as the most successful practitioner since Puccini of the most improbable of art forms—opera. To date he has written 23 that are of amazing diversity. Although his first opera, Amelia Goes to the Ball, was produced by the Metropolitan Opera when he was 27, few since then have been written for the world’s great, gilded opera houses and their audiences. Menotti has gone in search of a public all his own, one willing to share his special view of opera as contemporary, relevant music theater. For Broadway he wrote The Telephone, The Consul (which won for him the first of two Pulitzer Prizes), The Saint of Bleecker Street, and Maria Golovin. The Medium, which moved to Broadway after its premiere at Columbia University, was later expanded and turned into a feature film. ‘

He was the first to write an opera for radio, The Old Maid and the Thief, and for television, the much beloved Amahl and the Night Visitors. Martin’s Lie and The Egg were created to be performed in churches, and there are five stage works crafted expressly for children. There are comic operas, chamber operas, grand operas. Menotti has explored just about every twist the operatic form can be given. And he has done so as his own librettist, for he has loved words as long as he has loved music.

Although it is his operas that have carried his name around the world, he has not limited his need to express himself to the stage alone. In his catalog are three concertos, a symphony, many songs and choral pieces, ballets, incidental works, and chamber music. There is even a large output of poetry, plays, dramatic sketches, short stories, and movie and television scripts. His career as a stage director is equally far-flung. He established himself as the most probing interpreter of his own operas with the first production of The Medium. Since that event, a landmark in the annals of music theater, he has traveled far afield, re-creating his operas in America, Europe, Israel, Korea, Japan, Poland, and the Soviet Union. And with the founding in 1958 of the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy—yes, there is also Menotti the impresario to contend with—he has gone on to stage the works of other composers he particularly admires: La Bohème, Pelléas et Mélisande, Don Giovanni, Tristan und Isolde, Parsifal, Boris Godunov, The Marriage of Figaro, and The Rake’s Progress. He has been the subject of three books and several documentary films; recently he has signed a contract to produce a volume of autobiography.

Of all this activity—enough for a half-dozen careers for six men less youthful and gifted—perhaps the one that best reflects his artistic hopes and dreams is the Spoleto Festival. It was an idea, as Rizzo has written, “that only a madman—or a child—could entertain. When he proposed to bring together the most exciting creative and performing talents of Europe and America to put on a summer festival in an all-but-forgotten Italian hill town, professionals dismissed the plan as lunacy. It turned out to be lunacy of an inspired sort.” But Menotti the dreamer could not rest until he had established its American counterpart: Spoleto USA. He had to wait, however, until the Italian festival was firmly on its feet. He then had the thankless task of finding a setting in the United States that could match the charm and spontaneity of the original, a city in which the streets and parks could become stages, in which one could amble through a graceful environment and be submerged in an atmosphere of creativity.

But as always in his quests—whether for art, talent, or dollars—his luck held fast. In 1977, Spoleto USA was born in Charleston, South Carolina. It flourishes there in the late spring of each year as a rebuke to all those who predicted disaster, as they had with Spoleto, Italy. Not that Menotti has not had close scrapes with both festivals. There have been summers when it appeared that the end was at hand and there was not enough money for another season. But somehow, somewhere, he has always managed to find those willing to share his dreams and to make them realities, to join with him in extending a hand to hopeful performers, composers, painters, and directors who needed someone to have faith in them and give them a chance to show what they could do.

As he turns 80 this summer, there would seem to be little question of his importance in the world of the arts after all the honors that have been heaped upon him. Yet even at this venerable age, Menotti and his music are still as much damned as they are praised, which is probably yet a further measure of how creative and alive he remains. But this dichotomy has been part of Menotti’s career from the beginning. Even with the immense success of his early operas, he has been accused of being “facile,” “careless,” “obvious,” and “out-of-date,” and his popularity has been viewed suspiciously by the music establishment, as if succeeding so well and so easily is somehow not playing the game by the rules.

In dismissing Menotti, his critics have accused him of the routine, of breaking no new ground, and of making a blatant appeal to an audience’s sympathies. He has been labeled “the Puccini of the Poor.” (“Better that,” Menotti has countered, “than the Boulez of the Rich.”) But with smoke, there is usually some fire, and as one of his friends has pointed out, “His greatest enemy is time, and his greatest sin is haste.” Menotti has been spendthrift with his talent and pursued his goals with a feverishness that reflects his oft-repeated dictum that hell for an artist can be summed up in two words: “Too late!” Even before he became immersed in the politics and pressures of the two Spoletos, he was censured for working too quickly and not taking sufficient care. The current state of his scores—many of which cry out for polishing and a final form—reflects this.

“At best,” he has said, “an artist can find a certain kind of serenity in resigning himself to the curse of imperfection. Even artists who, like myself, have often been accused of superficiality simply because, to use Jorge Luis Borges’s happy phrase, ‘They scatter their gifts with indifferent glee,’ should not be so easily dismissed by suspicious critics simply as facile. The seemingly happy-go-lucky attitude (Rossini, Cocteau, or Bernini) is often but a screen for a deeper search. It is as if these artists scatter too heavy a load in order to run faster with their most precious possessions.”

He has been saying for at least two decades that he wants to take it easy, to stop accepting many of the commissions that still pour in, to give up directing opera, to find time to get his scores in definitive order, and to have more time for himself and his family (he recently became a grandfather). But no one really takes him seriously, for in the same breath he talks about being broke and wanting to establish a festival-school on the grounds of Yester House, his palatial home on the Scottish moors.

One thing he doesn’t bother about is what history will say of him. Nor is he entirely comfortable talking about himself or his work. “I think that a work of art should speak for itself,” he has repeatedly commented. “Curiously enough, I’m not always aware of what I have done in my music. I know there are certain things—motifs, dramatic ideas, etc.—that repeat themselves, but it is only after I have finished a piece that I realize I’ve written an opera about faith or love or whatever. It’s not something I plan.

“There are, to be sure, certain themes that come back again and again in my work. For example, the conflict between faith and skepticism—in The Medium, for example. There is a good deal of symbolism as well. You find it in The Saint of Bleecker Street and in Maria Golovin. Love, of course, is there, too. I’ve always imagined that love is a sort of illusion, that we invent the person we’re in love with. Our invention is never the real person but the one we imagine, and when that illusion is broken, that love is finished. That was the idea behind Maria Golovinathat, and the belief that love is like a prison.

“I also seem to be concerned with the theme of guilt. I think it’s obvious in a number of my operas. I believe we are, or should be, responsible for the death or unhappiness of anyone. Part of this manifests itself in the theme of escape, ways of getting around the guilt we feel. I have treated this both seriously in The Consul and The Most Important Man and, in The Last Savage, comically. It is all part of my constant desire of escaping my responsibilities in life and at the same time being trapped by conscience.

“I have been accused of putting people who are maimed physically or mentally in my operas to get the sympathy of an audience. But I think I do so partly because of my own personal sense of guilt about not being useful enough to society. People have said this guilt is behind my starting Spoleto. I think this is foolishness, but who knows? To me, all of us are maimed in some way, and we all have certain needs we have to struggle either with or against, some deficiency in our lives. Anyone who thinks he is perfect is stupid. Sometimes it is our imperfections that define us, and certainly some missing characteristic in a person’s makeup is a very obvious symbol to be used to create theater.

“I often feel that simply writing music is not enough to pay the ransom for all my sins. There are giant artists—like Michelangelo or Goya—who deserve to be forgiven anything because the task God gave them to do was that of producing great art. That is all we should ask of an artist. Show me a Wagner or a Bach who sacrificed his life in battle or who took care of the sick in a hospital. That was not why they were put on earth. Now I know I am no Bach. Who is? But I also know I am no Offenbach. Still, I feel I must try to justify my place on earth, be of some use.”

It has been written of dancer-choreographer Martha Graham, with whom Menotti has collaborated, that her creations are “a fever chart of the heart.” The same, on his own terms, holds true for Menotti and is as sound an explanation as any for the special appeal of his music and its emotional accessibility. Individual aspects of his work—his texts, his unashamed melodic style, his harmonic conservatism, his attempt to deal with pressing issues such as race and religion—may be decried or condemned. But the fact remains that he is able to give life to them on a stage. He is a man born to the theater, and one who rarely fails to drive home his dramatic premises, however faulty his methods.

“It is not necessary,” opera historian Donald Grout has written, “to make extravagant claims for Menotti’s originality in order to recognize that he is one of the very few serious opera composers on the contemporary American scene who thoroughly understands the requirements of the theater and of making a consistent, sincere attempt to reach the large opera-loving public; his success is a testimonial to the continuing validity of a long and respected operatic tradition.”

Noël Coward once remarked that “The trouble with opera is not that opera isn’t what it used to be, but that it is.” To Menotti, it isn’t even that. “There is a certain indolence,” he has said, “toward the use of the voice today, a tendency to treat the voice instrumentally, as if composers feared that its texture is too expressive, too human. Also, in destroying tonality, we have destroyed one of the most useful dramatic elements . . . . For these reasons, I prefer to write in a simple, recognizable language. Like today’s writers and poets, I prefer to continue using the spoken language. I do not feel the need for Esperanto, nor do I find obscurity or complexity a virtue. I have run the risk of sounding unfashionable in the hope that my music will appeal to open minds and untutored hearts.” One critic summing up Menotti has written that “He is a diverse music personality—a skillful and witty comedian who nonetheless writes grim and horrible tragedies; an heir to the past who does not hesitate to satirize his beloved masters; a realistic social commentator who bursts out into the most fantastic impossibilities; a musical traditionalist who commits hair-raising heresies without the flicker of an eyelash.”

Once, in a moment of what he termed “candid immodesty,” Menotti offered this appraisal of himself: “I would say my talent is a torturous mountain stream that runs deeper than people think, too impetuous at times, too easy-flowing at others, but never swerving from its single-minded and constant search for the wider sea.”

It has been said that in the arts, survival is everything. Menotti is a brilliant survivalist. He has survived not only the passing years with grace, but musical fads as well. That stream and its irresistible swift currents have carried him far, whatever shoals have been encountered along the way. Neither critical blows, artistic failures, nor personal disappointments have been able to strike him down or dull his affirmative outlook.

As he approaches 80, he still lives each day to the fullest, but understandably his thoughts tum at times toward the approaching end of his life. Menotti is not a religious man in an orthodox, church-going sense. “I’ve lost the intense and incandescent faith that nourished my childhood and adolescence, and it is a loss that has left me uneasy. I often feel like a runaway who suddenly finds himself wondering if he has not left home too soon. A certain nostalgia for my years of grace is, I believe, the knowledge that faith cannot be attained but can only be given by God as an act of grace. But alas—or fortunately, depending on how you look at it—my mind is too rational to abandon itself to faith. I am a would-be Voltaire yearning to be Tolstoy.”

At the age of 16, Menotti broke with the Catholic Church, and he very much doubts, “as some of my wishful religious friends predict, that at the last minute I shall ask for extreme unction and the holy sacraments . . . . I don’t wish to sound morbid; I’m looking forward to death. I’m rather optimistic about it, because I feel with it we will find something that we have been looking for all our lives, an answer that will finally put our searching minds at rest.

“I feel God owes us that answer. He gave us a mind, after all. He put the questions there we keep asking, and I think the answers will be in proportion to how much we have looked for in life. The people who never asked themselves any questions will just die, and that’s that. But for those who have searched for beauty and for truth, I think we will have an answer. And I think it will be blinding and all I have hoped for.”

For his search for beauty and truth, and for the light he has brought to many lives, MUSICAL AMERICA is proud to designate Gian Carlo Menotti as our 1991 Musician of the Year.

John Ardoin is music critic of The Dallas Morning News and author of The Stages of Menotti, published by Doubleday and Co., New York. He has just completed Furtwängler, a study of the influential German conductor, which will be published by Thames and Hudson, London-New York.