Amahl and the night visitors

“It's an opera for children because it attempts to recreate my own childhood. You see, when I was a child, I lived in Italy, and in Italy there is no Santa Claus. I suppose Santa Claus is too busy with American children to attend to Italian ones as well. Our gifts were brought to us by the Three Kings. (...) I owe those Three Kings, above all, the joyful Christmases of my childhood, and I should have remained very grateful to them. Instead, I came to America and soon forgot about them, because here, during the Christmas season, you see so many Santas scattered all over the city. Add to that the huge Christmas tree at Rockefeller Plaza, the elaborate store windows on Fifth Avenue, the hundred-voice choir at Grand Central Station, the countless Christmas carols on the radio and television—and all of this made me forget about the precious, old Three Kings of my childhood.
But in 1951, I found myself in serious trouble. I had been commissioned by the National Broadcasting Company to write an opera for television, with a deadline of Christmas, and I didn’t have a single idea in mind. One November afternoon, as I was strolling somewhat gloomily through the halls of the Metropolitan Museum, I happened to stop in front of Hieronymus Bosch’s painting The Adoration of the Kings, and as I looked at it, I suddenly heard once again, coming from the distant blue hills, the strange song of the Three Kings. That’s when I realized they had returned to me and brought me a gift.”

This is how Gian-Carlo Menotti described, in the original program booklet, what inspired him to create the opera Amahl and the Night Visitors. Menotti emphasized that while working on Amahl, he did not consider the characteristics of a television studio (which offered entirely new possibilities for visual presentation). His goal was universality, distinctive of “an ideal stage that has no counterpart in reality.”

The directing of the production Amahl and the Night Visitors was undertaken by Włodzimierz Nurkowski. He has previously staged productions for the Krakow Opera such as The Rape of Lucretia, Hansel and Gretel, Mr. Marimba, Cabaret Lunaire, Orpheus in the Underworld, Gianni Schicchi/Pagliacci, The Turk in Italy, The First Wrinkle, and Ariadne on Naxos. What will his vision of Monetti’s “television opera” be like?