Gian Carlo Menotti, The Consul (1950)

This isn't my first Menotti opera: I've seen his first, Amelia Goes to the Ball, a farce; Amahl and the Night Visitors, his popular Christmas opera; and Help, Help, the Globolinks! his weird science-fiction piece about the importance of music education (you see, music is the only think that can stop the alien Globolinks--is this really a widely-applicable lesson?). However, this is the first full-length one I've seen, and while all of those are comedies in one sense or another, this is a fairly grim tragedy, albeit with moments of black humor.

It takes place in an unnamed Eastern Bloc surveillance state. A dissident, John Sorel, is on the run from the authorities and plans to cross the frontier to another country. His wife, Magda, is to attain visas at the consulate of another unnamed country so she can cross the border along with John's mother and their infant son. But it's not easy to cross the border: you need a shit-ton of paperwork, and if anything's even slightly irregular, you'll be rejected. She keeps going back, getting more and more desperate, and meanwhile things are going from bad to worse at home: secret police agents are spying on them, the baby dies, and so too does Magda's mother-in-law. She hears from a fellow dissident that John is planning on coming back across the border with her, which would very likely lead to him getting caught and be extremely bad for the cause, so she resolves to send him a note to the effect that she's committing suicide so he'll have no reason to return. But it's too late; he returns anyway and is indeed captured, and at home, she kills herself. The end.

So yeah, not exactly cheerful, but compelling. There's a hallucination sequence at the very end after Magda has turned on the gas, which seemed to be dragging things out a bit, but otherwise, I have no problems with it. Surprisingly, the most compelling character--and the only one with a real arc--turns out to be the secretary at the consulate, who goes from blindly enforcing the bureaucratic order to recognizing the humanity of the people caught up in it. I believe Menotti wrote the libretti for all his operas himself, which is quite impressive.

Musically, it's pretty darned terrific--Menotti was a traditionalist, dealing in Puccini-esque romanticism, which causes some people to dismiss him as a minor composer, and in fairness, those other, short, operas that I've seen of his can't help, fairly or not, feeling a little slight. But this one to me feels kind of like a major artistic statement. It won Menotti a Pulitzer Prize, even! They give Pulitzers for operas? Apparently so. There are several performances available to watch, either on youtube or DVD; I chose this version, from a 1998 Italian festival. It's very good, really--Victoria Livengood as the secretary impressed me especially--but at some point the aspect ratio got screwed up, so everyone looks very squashed.

Actually, this wasn't Menotti's only Pulitzer: he also won one for his next full-length opera, The Saint of Bleecker Street, but for whatever reason, that one has not had the enduring popularity of this; there's no video available that I can see. Too bad. I'd definitely call myself a Menotti fan at this point.