Muted applause for Menotti milestone

Gian-Carlo Menotti remains a strangely invulnerable musical force from beyond the grave - despite the odds against him.

In the centennial of his birth, the composer who created populist opera is being celebrated in Princeton with Opera New Jersey's production of The Consul, which opened Saturday; on disc with a spate of long-unavailable recording reissues on the Naxos label (in deluxe remasterings by Philadelphia's Mark Obert-Thorn); and at the Curtis Institute of Music, his alma mater, with a memorabilia exhibition documenting the operas he wrote for radio, TV, and Broadway.

Though not the most respected composer to graduate from Curtis, Menotti had glamour, as evidenced in the large portrait that hangs at the school, immortalizing the dashing good looks he maintained into old age - long after the world had seen the monster that sometimes lurked beneath.

The Menotti who could burn bridges nearly as fast as he crossed them was also opera's greatest benefactor in postwar America. Amahl and the Night Visitors, the hour-long opera about a crippled boy who offers his crutch to the Christ child, premiered on live TV in 1959 and wasn't only a Christmas perennial for years, but also a staple of student and community theater.

Menotti's brand of opera - linear plotlines, Puccinian harmony, and lots of exterior action - is fashionable again and lives in the works of Jake Heggie and Mark Adamo. In fact, Stephen Schwartz's recent Seance on a Wet Afternoon should have taken cues from Menotti's The Medium, which confronts the paranormal far more succinctly.

Nonetheless, Menotti's reputation hasn't kept pace with that of Samuel Barber, whom Menotti met when both were Curtis students. Though two of Menotti's Broadway operas won the Pulitzer Prize - The Consul, about postwar secret police and implacable bureaucracy, and The Saint of Bleecker Street, about a modern-day girl's stigmata - the composer's achievements are strangely tainted.

When Menotti died in 2007 at age 95, more than half his operas were considered failures. He hadn't known a clear-cut success since the mid-1950s. The world pretended not to notice, as Menotti maintained a high public profile founding and running the Spoleto Festival of Two Worlds in Italy and Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, S.C. After seeing a lavish documentary on Menotti in the early '90s, I asked the filmmakers if they realized how much the composer was resting on his laurels. The reply: "The big picture is good."