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Amahl and the Night Visitors

Amahl and the Night Visitors is an opera in one act by Gian Carlo Menotti with an original English libretto by the composer.[1] It was commissioned by NBC and first performed by the NBC Opera Theatre on December 24, 1951, in New York City at NBC Studio 8H in Rockefeller Center, where it was broadcast live on television from that venue as the debut production of the Hallmark Hall of Fame. It was the first opera specifically composed for television in the United States.[2]

For the films, see Amahl and the Night Visitors (1957 film) and Amahl and the Night Visitors (1996 film).

Amahl and the Night Visitors

Menotti

English

December 24, 1951 (1951-12-24)

Composition history[edit]

Menotti was commissioned by Peter Herman Adler, director of NBC's new opera programming, to write the first opera for television. The composer had trouble settling on a subject for the opera, but took his inspiration from Hieronymus Bosch's The Adoration of the Magi hanging in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.


As the airdate neared, Menotti had yet to finish the score. The singers had little time to rehearse, and received the final passages of the score just days before the broadcast. The composer's partner Samuel Barber was brought in to complete the orchestrations.[3] After the dress rehearsal, NBC Symphony conductor Arturo Toscanini told Menotti, "This is the best you've ever done."[4]


Menotti distinctly wanted Amahl to be performed by a boy. In the "Production Notes" contained in the piano-vocal score he wrote: "It is the express wish of the composer that the role of Amahl should always be performed by a boy. Neither the musical nor the dramatic concept of the opera permits the substitution of a woman costumed as a child."[1]

Premiere[edit]

Menotti wrote Amahl with the stage in mind, even though it was intended for broadcast. "On television you're lucky if they ever repeat anything. Writing an opera is a big effort and to give it away for one performance is stupid."[2] The composer appeared on-screen in the premiere to introduce the opera and give the background of the events leading up to its composition. He also brought out director Kirk Browning and conductor Thomas Schippers to thank them on-screen.[6]


Amahl was seen on 35 NBC affiliates coast to coast, the largest network hookup for an opera broadcast to that date. An estimated five million people saw the live broadcast, the largest audience ever to see a televised opera.[7]

Performance history[edit]

1951–1962[edit]

For its first three telecasts, the program had been presented in black-and-white (there were two presentations of it in 1952, one on Easter and one during the Christmas season),[8] but beginning in 1953, it was telecast in color.[9] Because it was an opera, and commercial network television executives had increasingly little confidence in presenting opera on television, it later began to be scheduled, with rare exceptions, as an afternoon television program, rather than shown in prime time as had been done in its first few telecasts.[10] According to The New Kobbe's Complete Opera Book, the first stage performance was presented at Indiana University Bloomington, on February 21, 1952,[11] with conductor Ernest Hoffman. The opera's second performance was in Boston on December 18 and 19, 1952. It was presented by the Opera Club at the Agassiz Theatre of Radcliffe College, under the direction of Thomas H. Phillips for the Longy School of Music. James Hercules Sutton, 9, soloist for Alfred Nash Patterson at the Church of the Advent, played Amahl; Claire Smith played the mother; Walter Lambert, Paul Johnson and Hermann Gantt played the three kings.

Recordings[edit]

For several years it was assumed that the film (kinescope) of the original telecast had been lost, but a copy was found, transferred to video, and is now available at The Paley Center for Media (formerly The Museum of Television & Radio) and online at the Museum of Broadcast Communications.[16]


The original 1951 telecast has never been rebroadcast, although bootleg recordings have been made. A kinescope of the 1955 broadcast starring Bill McIver as Amahl was digitized in 2007 and is available commercially on DVD. The 1955 and 1978 productions are the only ones released on video. Cast recordings of both the 1951 and the 1963 productions were released on LP by RCA Victor, and the 1951 cast recording was reissued on compact disc in 1987. The 1963 recording of Amahl was the first recording of the opera made in stereo.

Legacy[edit]

Amahl and the Night Visitors was the first network television Christmas special to become an annual tradition. There had already been several television productions of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol since about 1947, but they had not been shown annually or presented by the same television network, with the same general technical staff, as Amahl was. Until 1963, Amahl was nearly always presented with many of the same singers and production staff.[17] From 1951 until 1966 it was presented every year on NBC (which commissioned Menotti to write it) on or around Christmas Eve, as an episode of an existing anthology series, such as The Alcoa Hour,[18] NBC Television Opera,[19] or the Hallmark Hall of Fame.[20] The 1978 production of Amahl also premiered on NBC, before it went to cable television in the early 1980s.


A film based on Amahl, Amahl and the Night Visitors, was made in Britain in 1996 by Christine Edzard.

List of Christmas operas

Barnes, Jennifer (2003), Television Opera: The Fall of Opera Commissioned for Television, Boydell Press,  0-85115-912-5

ISBN

Notes


Sources

Amahl and the Night Visitors - Premier Broadcast on NBC (1951) on archive.org

Video: Performed by Milwaukee Opera Theatre