Gian-Carlo Menotti, who died last week at the age of 95, was an unusual composer in that he wrote his own libretti for his many operas. (Probably the only thing he had in common with Wagner.)
Menotti’s words are of as much interest to speechwriters as his music. If every speech is to some extent a dramatic monologue, some speeches rise almost to the level of an operatic aria. So it can be instructive to watch a good librettist at work.
I’ll offer one example from Menottti’s 1950 opera, The Consul, for which he received the Drama Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. This particular example is noteworthy for the power of the words and also for Menotti’s use of rhythm and alliteration.
The Consul tells the story a woman named Magda Sorel, who is a victim of political persecution in her homeland. In an effort to join her husband, who has already fled abroad, she makes repeated visits to a consulate in the hope of obtaining a visa.
On each visit, however, she is stymied by bureaucratic inertia. The consul’s secretary, whose compassion has been exhausted from dealing with endless pitiful cases of this kind, denies Magda access to the consul. Instead, she gives her stacks of meaningless forms to fill out.
In a show-stopping aria in the second act, Magda rebels against the inhumanity of these paper barriers. In desperation, she sings:
To this we’ve come:
That men withhold the world from men.
No ship no shore for him who drowns at sea.
No home nor grave for him who dies on land.
To this we’ve come:
That man be born a stranger on God’s earth,
That he be chosen without a chance for choice,
That he be hunted without the hope of refuge,
To this we’ve come;
And you, you too, shall weep …
To which the secretary replies: “You’re being very unreasonable, Mrs. Sorel.”
The country where the opera takes place is not named, although it is supposed to be somewhere in Europe. The consul is not named, nor is the country he represents. That’s the whole point. The Consul is a story that could have taken place not only in Europe, but in almost any corner of the world and in almost any decade of the troubled Twentieth Century. The despairing cry, “To this we’ve come”, must surely have been uttered innumerable times, in many tongues.
