Амаль и ночные гости: Опера Джанкарло Менотти

Opera by Gian Carlo Menotti

Amahl and the Night Visitors is an opera in one act by Gian Carlo Menotti with an original English libretto by the composer. 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.

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." 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.

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), but beginning in 1953, it was telecast in color. 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. According to The New Kobbe's Complete Opera Book, the first stage performance was presented at Indiana University Bloomington, on February 21, 1952, 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.

For years, Amahl was presented live, but in 1963 it was videotaped by NBC with conductor Herbert Grossman and an all new cast featuring Kurt Yaghjian as Amahl, Martha King as the Mother, and John McCollum, Willis Patterson, and Richard Cross as the Three Kings. This was the first television production of "Amahl" in which the role of King Balthazar was sung by a real African American. Earlier productions, including the 1951 original version, had had a white man in blackface singing the role. When Menotti found out that NBC had scheduled the taping on a date when he was out of the country, he tried to get the date changed. The network refused and recorded the 1963 performance without the composer's presence or participation, telecasting it in December 1963, and twice more after that — in 1964 and 1965. Menotti never approved of the 1963 production, and in May 1966 when the rights to future broadcasts reverted to him, the composer refused to allow it to be shown again. Because of this, Amahl was not shown on television at all between 1966 and 1978.

In 1978, a new production starring Teresa Stratas as Amahl's mother, Robert Sapolsky as Amahl, and Willard White, Giorgio Tozzi and Nico Castel as the Three Kings was filmed by NBC, partly on location in the Holy Land. As was the norm for filmed opera, the music was pre recorded and the singers mimed their performances to the playback. This performance was so successful that it was repeated on Christmas Eve 1954 with substantially the same cast apart from the Page sung by John Carvalho and the dancer, Betty Ferrier. Both performances were broadcast live. A telerecording of the 1954 performance was broadcast on Christmas Eve 1956 but this recording seems to have been discarded. An audio recording of the 1954 performance exists in private hands. Further performances followed in subsequent years. The 1955 performance was also produced by Christian Simpson, starring Malcolm Day as Amahl, with Gladys Whitred as Amahl's mother. Music was provided by the Sinfonia of London. It appears that this performance was also broadcast live. It was either not recorded or the recording was discarded. It does not exist in the BBC Archives. The second production was broadcast on December 24, 1959. This version exists as a 35 mm telerecording in the BBC Archives. This version was again produced by Christian Simpson and starred Christopher Nicholls as Amahl and Elsie Morison as Amahl's mother. This time music was provided by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.

A version was broadcast on ABC on Australian television in 1957. It was aired live in Melbourne on 18 December 1957, and was kinescoped to be shown in Sydney on Christmas Day. It is not known if the kinescope recording still exists.

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. 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.

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. 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, NBC Television Opera, or the Hallmark Hall of Fame. 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.