Read on to discover how the first broadcast of Amahl and the Night Visitors launched a celebrated US Christmas tradition...
When did Menotti write Amahl and the Night Visitors?
There is, they say, nothing like a looming deadline to focus the attention. That is precisely the situation composer Gian Carlo Menotti addressed in November 1951. A year previously he had accepted a commission from the NBC television network to write an opera for screening at the Christmas season. Mere weeks before the broadcast was due to happen, his creative block was total. ‘I just didn’t have an idea in my head,’ he admitted.
Then inspiration struck. One afternoon, as Menotti walked ‘rather gloomily’ through the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, one painting in particular struck him. It was Hieronymus Bosch’s The Adoration of the Magi, and it unlocked a flood of memories from childhood Christmases in Italy, where the Three Kings traditionally distributed the presents. The ‘weird song’ they sang suddenly came back to Menotti, and the seed was planted of what was soon to become a new 50-minute opera: Amahl and the Night Visitors.
Amahl was not the first opera to be seen on television. That honour belonged to another of Menotti’s pieces, The Old Maid and the Thief, originally written for NBC radio in 1939. Ten years later it was the first opera televised by the newly founded NBC Opera Theatre, whose brief was to put operas both old and new on television screens across the US – ‘quality’ content which would, executives reasoned, appeal to both well-heeled viewers and the advertisers who targeted their disposable income.
Amahl and the Night Visitors... a scrabble to the finish line
As the suits at NBC juggled the numbers, Menotti scrambled to get the libretto of Amahl completed and the music written. Chet Allen, a 12-year-old boy, was cast as Amahl, a crippled shepherd boy who encounters the Three Kings on their journey to see Jesus, with mezzo-soprano Rosemary Kuhlmann as his mother. A set was swiftly designed and built, and director Kirk Browning began grappling with a complex matrix of stage movements and camera angles.
Would it all be ready in time? Thankfully, with Menotti’s partner Samuel Barber at hand to help with the orchestration, it was… just. At 9.30pm on 24 December 1951, in Studio 8-H at NBC’s headquarters in the Rockefeller Center, Manhattan, the cast and crew of Amahl and the Night Visitors stood ready for the live broadcast. Menotti himself provided a spoken, to-camera introduction, before conductor Thomas Schippers cued the opera’s evocative prelude, complete with its exotically tinted oboe tune.
Amahl and the Night Visitors... a stunning success
Across the US an estimated five million people watched Amahl that Christmas Eve, on 35 of NBC’s affiliate channels. Their response was overwhelmingly positive. ‘Enthusiastic listeners jammed the company’s telephone switchboard for more than an hour after the performance,’ the New York Times reported. The paper’s formidable classical music critic Olin Downes was also highly complimentary, praising Chet Allen for his ‘remarkable interpretation’ of Amahl, and heralding the broadcast as ‘a historic event in the rapidly evolving art of television’.
Menotti’s heartwarming seasonal opera quickly became a staple of the Christmas television schedule in the US, with numerous stage productions both professional and amateur mounted since. Menotti wrote other operas after Amahl and the Night Visitors, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Saint of Bleecker Street in 1955. But none of them enjoyed anything approaching Amahl’s enduring popularity.
Olin Downes, emphasising the timeliness of the opera’s message in a brutally conflict-ridden century, was in no doubt as to why. ‘The sight and sound of this work,’ he wrote, ‘which so simply and unpretentiously symbolises faith, mercy and peace on the earth that the meek shall one day inherit, could hardly have fallen at any period in modern history on more grateful eyes and ears.’