Is there any 20th century composer less comfortable to contemporary tastes than Menotti? A rehashed Romantic, they might say, before modernism even got off the ground. The victim of his greatest success, his Christmas opera Amahl and the Night Visitors.
Like
Messiah, Amahl is nearly always performed by amateurs. Some wonderful, most B+, some awful. It requires a pre-adolescent singer of great skill. He always steals the show. I got thinking about this last Sunday after working with my magic student Gwen on a far less well-known piece, the so-called "Monica's Waltz" monologue from Menotti's
The Medium. The vocal demands are advanced. The character herself is a young and very strange woman. It is for me one of the best solo scenes in 20th century opera. It has a fluidity that hectors with great penetration the bizarre actions of the character. She causes a boy with whom she lives (both are parentless) to mime a kind of love paean to her, all of which she sings. The piece is a kind of shadow duet in which the singer must convince in both roles, the mime in only one.
in the Berkshire Review for the Arts.