Also on the Dec. 6 BHSO concert, instrumental pieces from Amahl and the Night Visitors. (Get your tickets from the Performing Arts Center box office.) “Amahl and the Night Visitors” was the first U.S. opera commissioned and composed specifically for television broadcast, as the debut production of the “Hallmark Hall of Fame,” and its annual televised performances on NBC were a staple of the Christmas season from its 1951 premiere through the mid-1960s. In fact, it was the first network Christmas special to become an annual tradition. Several performances were separately produced and broadcast by the BBC in the 1950s, and Australia’s ABC broadcast a version in 1957. A new production, filmed partly on location in the Holy Land, was filmed by NBC in 1978, but it did not become a tradition. As an hour-long television event, the opera was written as a single act, and Italian-born Gian Carlo Menotti created both the score and the English libretto, which tells of the miraculous healing of a crippled boy while he and his mother provide hospitality to the “night visitors” — the three Magi on the journey to honor the Christ child. Menotti wrote more than two dozen operas, as well as several ballets and choral works, symphonies, a violin concerto and a stage play, and he won two Pulitzer Prizes. But his unique place in American cultural history owes to “Amahl,” a work that he actually conceived for the stage — because he assumed it would be broadcast only once.
Posted on: Thu, 04 Dec 2014 00:24:39 +0000
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