{"id":50945,"date":"2024-12-22T11:30:00","date_gmt":"2024-12-22T10:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/4caee61e-b0ca-4739-82a3-e31c11bb7c77"},"modified":"2024-12-22T12:09:19","modified_gmt":"2024-12-22T11:09:19","slug":"amahl-and-the-night-visitors-an-iconic-us-christmas-tv-tradition","status":"publish","type":"rss_feed","link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/rss_feed\/amahl-and-the-night-visitors-an-iconic-us-christmas-tv-tradition\/","title":{"rendered":"Amahl and the Night Visitors: an iconic US Christmas TV tradition"},"content":{"rendered":"

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By <\/p>

Published: Sunday, 22 December 2024 at 10:30 AM<\/p>

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Read on to discover how the first broadcast of Amahl and the Night Visitors<\/em> launched a celebrated US Christmas tradition…<\/strong><\/p>

When did Menotti write Amahl and the Night Visitors<\/em>?<\/h2>
There is, they say, nothing like a looming deadline to focus the attention. That is precisely the situation composer Gian Carlo Menotti addressed in November 1951. A year previously he had accepted a commission from the NBC television network to write an opera<\/a><\/strong> for screening at the Christmas season. Mere weeks before the broadcast was due to happen, his creative block was total. \u2018I just didn\u2019t have an idea in my head,\u2019 he admitted.<\/p>

The best Christmas operas of all time<\/a><\/strong><\/li> <\/ul>
Then inspiration struck. One afternoon, as Menotti walked \u2018rather gloomily\u2019 through the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, one painting in particular struck him. It was Hieronymus Bosch<\/a><\/strong>\u2019s The Adoration of the Magi<\/em>, and it unlocked a flood of memories from childhood Christmases in Italy, where the Three Kings traditionally distributed the presents. The \u2018weird song\u2019 they sang suddenly came back to Menotti, and the seed was planted of what was soon to become a new 50-minute opera: Amahl and the Night Visitors<\/em>.<\/p>

<\/div> <\/figure> Amahl<\/em> was not the first opera to be seen on television. That honour belonged to another of Menotti\u2019s pieces, The Old Maid and the Thief<\/em>, originally written for NBC radio in 1939. Ten years later it was the first opera televised by the newly founded NBC Opera Theatre, whose brief was to put operas both old and new on television screens across the US \u2013 \u2018quality\u2019 content which would, executives reasoned, appeal to both well-heeled viewers and the advertisers who targeted their disposable income.<\/p> <h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Amahl and the Night Visitors<\/em>… a scrabble to the finish line<\/h2> As the suits at NBC juggled the numbers, Menotti scrambled to get the libretto of Amahl<\/em> completed and the music written. Chet Allen, a 12-year-old boy, was cast as Amahl, a crippled shepherd boy who encounters the Three Kings on their journey to see Jesus, with mezzo-soprano Rosemary Kuhlmann as his mother. A set was swiftly designed and built, and director Kirk Browning began grappling with a complex matrix of stage movements and camera angles.<\/p> <ul class=\"wp-block-list\"> <li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.classical-music.com\/features\/works\/20-best-operas-all-time\">These are the 20 best operas of all time – and the revelatory recordings you need<\/a><\/strong><\/li> <\/ul> Would it all be ready in time? Thankfully, with Menotti\u2019s partner <a href=\"https:\/\/www.classical-music.com\/features\/composers\/samuel-barber\">Samuel Barber<\/a><\/strong> at hand to help with the orchestration, it was\u2026 just. At 9.30pm on 24 December 1951, in Studio 8-H\u00a0at NBC\u2019s headquarters in the Rockefeller Center, Manhattan, the cast and crew of Amahl and the Night Visitors<\/em> stood ready for the live broadcast. Menotti himself provided a spoken, to-camera introduction, before conductor Thomas Schippers cued the opera\u2019s evocative prelude, complete with its exotically tinted <a href=\"https:\/\/www.classical-music.com\/features\/instruments\/oboe-vs-clarinet\">oboe<\/a><\/strong> tune.<\/p> <h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Amahl and the Night Visitors… a stunning success<\/h2> Across the US an estimated five million people watched Amahl<\/em> that Christmas Eve, on 35 of NBC\u2019s affiliate channels. Their response was overwhelmingly positive. \u2018Enthusiastic listeners jammed the company\u2019s telephone switchboard for more than an hour after the performance,\u2019 the New York Times <\/em>reported. The paper\u2019s formidable classical music critic Olin Downes was also highly complimentary, praising Chet Allen for his \u2018remarkable interpretation\u2019 of Amahl, and heralding the broadcast as \u2018a historic event in the rapidly evolving art of television\u2019.<\/p> <ul class=\"wp-block-list\"> <li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.classical-music.com\/features\/works\/best-christmas-musicals\">Christmas musicals: 10 of the best<\/a><\/strong><\/li> <\/ul> Menotti\u2019s heartwarming seasonal opera quickly became a staple of the Christmas television schedule in the US, with numerous stage productions both professional and amateur mounted since. Menotti wrote other operas after Amahl and the Night Visitors<\/em>, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Saint of Bleecker Street<\/em>\u00a0in 1955. But none of them enjoyed anything approaching Amahl<\/em>\u2019s enduring popularity.\u00a0<\/p> <ul class=\"wp-block-list\"> <li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.classical-music.com\/articles\/brief-history-christmas-music\">Christmas music origins: how did festive music start?<\/a><\/strong><\/li> <\/ul> Olin Downes, emphasising the timeliness of the opera\u2019s message in a brutally conflict-ridden century, was in no doubt as to why. \u2018The sight and sound of this work,\u2019 he wrote, \u2018which so simply and unpretentiously symbolises faith, mercy and peace on the earth that the meek shall one day inherit, could hardly have fallen at any period in modern history on more grateful eyes\u00a0and ears.\u2019<\/p> <\/body><\/html>\n<hr class=\"no-tts wp-block-separator\"\/>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Published: Sunday, 22 December 2024 at 10:30 AM Read on to discover how the first broadcast of Amahl and the Night Visitors launched a celebrated US Christmas tradition… When did Menotti write Amahl and the Night Visitors? There is, they say, nothing like a looming deadline to focus the attention. That is precisely the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":50946,"template":"","categories":[1],"acf":{"readingTimeMinutes":"4"},"uagb_featured_image_src":{"full":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2024\/12\/amahl-and-the-night-visitors-an-iconic-us-christmas-tv-tradition.jpg",1200,800,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2024\/12\/amahl-and-the-night-visitors-an-iconic-us-christmas-tv-tradition-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2024\/12\/amahl-and-the-night-visitors-an-iconic-us-christmas-tv-tradition-300x200.jpg",300,200,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2024\/12\/amahl-and-the-night-visitors-an-iconic-us-christmas-tv-tradition-768x512.jpg",768,512,true],"large":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2024\/12\/amahl-and-the-night-visitors-an-iconic-us-christmas-tv-tradition-1024x683.jpg",800,534,true],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2024\/12\/amahl-and-the-night-visitors-an-iconic-us-christmas-tv-tradition.jpg",1200,800,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2024\/12\/amahl-and-the-night-visitors-an-iconic-us-christmas-tv-tradition.jpg",1200,800,false]},"uagb_author_info":{"display_name":"importmanagerhub@sprylab.com","author_link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/author\/importmanagerhubsprylab-com\/"},"uagb_comment_info":0,"uagb_excerpt":"By Published: Sunday, 22 December 2024 at 10:30 AM Read on to discover how the first broadcast of Amahl and the Night Visitors launched a celebrated US Christmas tradition… When did Menotti write Amahl and the Night Visitors? There is, they say, nothing like a looming deadline to focus the attention. That is precisely the…","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rss_feed\/50945"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rss_feed"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/rss_feed"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/50946"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}