Amahl and the Night Visitors Revisited

The 20^th century has produced an incredible array of holiday resources, some pretty bizarre. Remember flocked trees, some orange or lavender? Remember stainless-steel Christmas trees? Then there was a reindeer named Rudolph, who permanently nosed his way into Christmas.

Amid awful manifestations of Christmas are other awe-filled representations of this holiday. My personal favorite is Gian Carlo Menotti’s “Amahl and the Night Visitors.” This one-act opera in English was commissioned by NBC in 1951 to be aired over the young technology named television. It is the story of an overnight stay by the Magi at Amahl and his mother’s home as they follow the star toward Christ’s birthplace. These Magi, far from plaster figurines found in many crib scenes, are wonderfully human, delightfully eccentric, and faithfully driven people. Amahl, the young crippled boy, is a bit of a space cadet, a daydreamer. His single-parent mother, exhausted from work, has little enthusiasm for her son’s imaginative thoughts. What a great crew of humanity to birth and berth a messiah.

Back in 1951 television transmission was black and white, and confined to a TV screen in most people’s homes no larger than 14 inches. Such was the venue for my first encounter with “Amahl and the Night Visitors.” It intrigued me then, and now, more than 50 years later, this deceptively simple opera still mesmerizes me.

Menotti’s exploration into the birth of Christ is a great example of midrash, a term less familiar to Christians than to Jews who developed this unique form of storytelling.

Midrashic stories enhance biblical stories, imaginatively filling in blank spaces, expanding on underdeveloped of missing events, or casting them in a contemporary situation or language. Midrash explores biblical stories, not through analysis, but through imagination. Menotti is a master at midrash.

It’s been a while since “Amahl and the Night Visitors” has appeared on television, but live performances of Menotti’s opera happen during the Christmas season. I was fortunate to see the Ars Viva Symphony Orchestra’s production of “Amahl and the Night Visitors” recently in Skokie, Illinois. This production transformed the black and white, small screen, original TV version into a colorful, full-stage, live performance. Once again, I was transfixed by Menotti’s miraculous music and story.

Trash your memories of flocked and stainless-steel trees. Silence the song about a red-nosed reindeer. Reread Matthew and Luke’s birth of Christ stories. Listen to Menotti’s midrashic Christmas story known as “Amahl and the Night Visitors.”

Merry Christmas.

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Three Operas

In the past three months I’ve been involved in the productions of three operas, in three cities, in three states. Sometimes it is difficult to argue the relevance of opera to our daily lives, and often more difficult to argue the relevance of particular operas to our Christian lives. What follows, however, are reflections on three particular opera productions, in three particular settings.

Immediately upon my return from Shanghai this summer, I went to El Paso, Texas to work on El Paso Opera’s September production of Verdi’s Aida. (Images of elephants are usually the first association we have with Aida. Unfortunately, Kimba, the elephant which had starred in EPO’s previous production of the opera several years ago, had other bookings and was thus unavailable. Bringing a new “star” in from Los Angeles, by train, would have cost $20,000.) So we contented ourselves with ”noble steeds” for the Triumphal Scene.

It is difficult to escape the influence of religion on the Aida story. So much of the conflict between Amneris and Aida is exacerbated by the high priest, Ramphis’ declarations of “death and destruction” to the infidels. Although the drama ends, as most popular tragedies do, with the violent death of the protagonists, in the second act clemency is offered to the war captives by the Ethiopian king.

From El Paso and Aida I went to Chicago and Chamber Opera Chicago’s production of “A Menotti Tribute” mounted in honor of Gian Carlo Menotti, who died earlier this year. Menotti’s adopted son, Francis Menotti, joined us as stage director as we presented scenes from Maria Golovin, The Last Savage and Goya as well as from Menotti’s more well-known works, such as The Medium, The Consul and Amahl and the Night Visitors.

A tribute such as this is ”all about” organizing the many performers involved in casting the various works (25 singers in this case), putting together production schedules that take into account everyone’s oprofessional obligations, developing scenery which can suggest differing settings with one or two set pieces and helping instrumentalists organize a stack of excerpts and parts. Then it is about developing an emotional “through line” which helps the audience take an emotional journey from the comical self-absorbtion of Miss Todd and Miss Pinkerton (in The Old Maid and the Thief) through the tensions of Baba’s disintegrating personality (in The Medium) into the visceral pain and desperation of Magda, caught in the vagaries of an immigration bureaucracy (in The Consul) to the children’s musical defense against the Martians in Help, Help, the Globolinks.

The evening ended with the final scene from the Saint of Bleecker Street and Anina’s taking of Holy Vows immediately before her death. Rooted as it is in the faith of the Catholic Church, the Saint of Bleecker Street is perhaps Menotti’s finest, most sincere and most powerful work.

From Chicago, I went to Colorado State University to conduct a performance of Benjamin Britten’s Rape of Lucretia. One cannot complain about the opportunity to be in Fort Collins, Colorado for two weeks in “peak color” season.

The power struggle between the Etruscans and the Romans, depicted through the rape of Collatinus’ wife Lucretia is a difficult and oppressive topic. Since the production was performed by full-time students of Colorado State, we rehearsed once a day, in the evenings. We all needed and used the respite of the day to “walk away from” the darkness and anger and violence of the story of one man’s domination of a woman and one society’s domination of another.

Britten was criticized for framing the story of Lucretia’s rape (set many years Before Christ) in a Christian setting (provided by the “commentary” of Male and Female Chorus throughout the opera). Some in the audience experienced this Christian frame as an irritating and irrelevant”add-on” while others experienced it as a merciful, reassuring, edifying “context” for the violence depicted in the opera. The cast and I found, however, that we were dependent on the catharsis provided by Male Chorus’ proclamation of forgiveness and goodness and light at the close of each day’s rehearsls.

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Musical Microtrend

The book, Microtrends by Mark J. Penn (New York: Twelve, Hachette Book Group USA, 2007) offers a fascinating glimpse into “the small forces behind tomorrow’s big changes.” The author is best known for identifying a group of women he named, “Soccer Moms” who were critical swing voters in the 1996 presidential election.

The author defines a microtrend as “an intense identity group, that is growing, which has needs and wants unmet by the current crop of companies, marketers, policymakers, and others who would influence society’s behavior.” One microtrend Mark J. Penn identifies is the “Neo-Classicals.” He claims that “classical music is growing in popularity, not shrinking. And in the coming years, we should expect it to grow even more.” He points to the fact that in the 2000-1 season, concert tickets were up 10% from a decade earlier. In one city, even though season subscribers dropped 5%, single ticket sales increased by 46%. Likewise, the total number of classical music performances in the United States in the year 2000 grew 10% from the previous year, and increased 45% from ten years earlier. “Most industries would call that growth.”

The news gets even better: the number of students majoring in music is up by half since 1992; classical music is more popular through the Internet than in stores; half of www.classicalarchives.com subscribers are under 50 years of age; the number of Americans 55 years or older, a staple of classical music enthusiasts, will double in the next 25 years.There are other big encouraging signs and statistics for the future of classical music in this little section in Microtrends (pp. 285-288).

This microtrend is music to our ears!

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Call Me The Seeker

This post was written by Peter Gilmour, and posted on October 3, 2007 | Filed Under culture, music and religion | Double-click any word for more info | View other posts by Peter Gilmour | Leave a Comment | For info on this author, visit http://homepages.luc.edu/~pgilmou/

Because of his surname, I recently noticed a book titled, Call Me The Seeker edited by Michael J. Gilmour. He is no known relation to me. It was, however, the subtitle, “Listening to Religion in Popular Music” that caught my attention. The book is a series of sixteen articles divided into three parts: (1) Religious Sources behind Popular Music; (2) Religious Themes in Popular Music; and (3) Religion and Popular Music’s Audiences. In his introduction, Michael Gilmour writes, “…we share the conviction that spirituality is widely represented in popular music. Songwriters engage religions and their texts and explore grand theological questions, sometimes deliberately, sometimes not.” Well said, Mr. Gilmour. But it strikes me that the word “popular” could be substituted with the word, “classical;” the word, “Songwriters” could be substituted with the word, “composers,” and the sentence would be equally true. Michael Gilmour, in addition to editing this book, wrote one of the essays titled, “The Prophet Jeremiah, Aung San Suu Kyi, and U2’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind: On Listening to Bono’s Jeremiad .” The reference to Aung San Suu Kyi, 1991 Nobel Peace Prize recipient and a leading figure in the current fight for democracy in Myanmar (the former Burma), is particularly poignant today given the recent crackdown in that country. In some circles, the prophet Jeremiah today might be the lesser known of these two! Michael Gilmour argues “…that the relationship of these two clues – the biblical prophet Jeremiah, and this modern-day political “prophet” and social activist – is significant for understanding All That You Can’t Leave Behind.

Music, whether popular or classical, is essentially a spiritual activity and expression. Some songwriters and composers do a better job expressing and communicating their spiritualities than others. Some audiences do a better job hearing and receiving artists’ spiritualities than others. Clearly, Michael J. Gilmour and his colleagues have heard and relate to the spiritual expressions of popular music.

I call them the seekers!

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Names and Words– an end, for a while

This post was written by Charles Jonah, and posted on September 11, 2007 | Filed Under religion, music and religion | Double-click any word for more info | View other posts by Charles Jonah | Leave a Comment | For info on this author, visit http://www.sdgmusic.org/voices/2007/07/31/introduction/

It is not easy to characterize people by one criterion. I spoke at the funeral of my friend Bill earlier this year and talking with the kids afterwards provoked the same thought in all of us. Bill had bought one of the first Apple ][+ computers in the late ‘70’s and one would have said he was technologically advanced. However, to my amuse/amaze-ment and his children’s consternation/horror, he stuck with dial-up until his death.

Why do I bring this up here? My last two posts have had opposite views on modern hymnody – gender neutrality in hymns is not an absolute for me – “give me that old-time hymn” expresses my view if the substitution upsets the textual flow. However, I am willing to consider God both as masculine and feminine – far from that “old-time religion”.

Continuing in that line, in general I am not wild about (or to be more correct, I dislike, but not rabidly) the substitution of “you” for “thou” – the latter is archaic but still easily understood and expresses to me a feeling that God is different than the ordinary people we know and consider. As Brian Wren so nicely puts it (see previous post) “Great, living God, never fully known”. This of course is contrary to the German usage, which uses the 2nd person pronoun “du”, which is normally only used for family, little children, animals, and close personal friends.

To me, a formality in worship helps separate worship from everyday life, in a way I suspect like some Catholics feel about the Tridentine Mass. Worship is both part of and separated from everyday life. As Moses was told to remove his sandals because he was on sacred ground, I like to think that going to worship requires some preparation and some focus.

A final thought to toss into this stewpot of ideas. Bishop Muskens has said:

“Allah is a very beautiful word for God. Shouldn’t we all say that from now on we will name God Allah?” he said.

“What does God care what we call him? It is our problem.”

I agree, it is our problem. However because it is a problem to some of us, it will affect our worship experience and our response to God. But, from the hymnody point of view, we could have more mellifluous hymns.

So what am I – conservative, liberal or what? As a friend at our high school reunion commented; he would get together with two other friends from high school and one was very liberal and the other was very conservative. My comment was “does that make you just right?” Of course there is no just right – we all grow and develop in life in different ways. Hopefully my way is best for me (but possibly/probably not for you).

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