The Italian composer Gian Carlo Menotti, who has died aged 95, was an all-rounder of musical theatre with an enduring respect for the expressive power of the human voice. He aimed to reach a large audience - above all with Amahl and the Night Visitors, written for Christmas television viewers. The most successful of his 22 operas were performed with a frequency unknown to most composers during their lifetimes.
In 1957, after three decades of living in the US, he returned to Italy to found a prestigious arts festival in Spoleto. He also directed other composer's operas around the world, though ultimately came to regret this distraction from writing his own works.
While he was unhappy till the end of his life that many in Italy associated him above all with Spoleto, in the US he was often spoken of as the only successor to Puccini. He was respected by most American composers of his and subsequent generations, who maintained that his successes helped contemporary American music to survive after the second world war.
One of eight brothers and sisters, Menotti was born into a well-off family at Cadegliano, on Lake Lugano in Lombardy. His pianist mother got him enrolled at the Milan Conservatoire, and the great conductor Arturo Toscanini, a friend of the family, recommended that they send the 16-year-old to study in the US. One of his first American friends at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia was fellow student and future composer Samuel Barber, a year his senior. The two lived, travelled and worked together on and off till Barber's death in 1981.
In 1937, Menotti had his first important composition performed. The comic, one-act Amelia Goes to the Ball was well received in New York, and the Metropolitan Opera took it up for the next season. Then NBC radio commissioned an opera from him, The Old Maid and the Thief (1939).
During the second world war, Menotti stayed in the US, though he retained Italian citizenship for the whole of his life. In 1946 came the successful one-act comic opera The Telephone, which went on to become a curtain-raiser to The Medium, premiered at Columbia University the same year - his first work to win major American and subsequently international recognition.
The Medium, which Menotti claimed to have been inspired by personal experiences of spiritualism, offered a great dramatic role to a contralto as the fake medium Madame Flora, first sung by Marie Powers, who also appeared in the film version that Menotti directed himself in 1951 in Rome.
The Consul (1950) and The Saint of Bleecker Street (1954), both of which won him Pulitzer Prizes and popular success, succeeded in marrying Italian melodrama to the Broadway musical. He wrote the librettos for both operas himself and would often direct their staging. Sometimes he was criticised for letting the melody suffocate the musical quality, but nobody disputed the highly effective theatricality of both works, which time may well award a place beside Porgy and Bess, Peter Grimes and West Side Story among the great "musical dramas" of the century.
The Consul was very topical in the 1950s, with its setting in an (unnamed) European police state where a woman spends anguished hours in a consulate seeking to obtain a visa for herself and her husband, a dissident militant. The variegated score has echoes of Bartok as well as Puccini, but the three acts are perhaps flawed by such mawkish interpolations as the woman's dreams of freedom. The drama is weakened by the absence of a real villain. The Consul himself never appears, and while the police chief makes a frightening appearance, he does not - unlike Puccini's Scarpia - get a good aria.
The Saint of Bleecker Street is even more steeped in Menotti's Italian roots, including those he found among Italians in Philadelphia and later in Greenwich Village, New York, where the colourful procession in honour of the Neapolitan Saint Januarius had left a lasting sceptical impression on his northern Italian mind, enhancing his religious doubts. He gave strong musical expression to the characters of the non-believer Michele and his sister Annina, towards whom he displays incestuously angled protectiveness when she reveals inexplicable stigmate on her hands, inspiring veneration by the crowds of Little Italy.
In the period following these successes, Menotti began to feel restless in America, even if he did not lack work. His music was not only theatrical: concert works, a ballet and children's pieces were widely appreciated, and the commission from NBC for Amahl and the Night Visitors (1951) brought his most performed work into being.
For Brussels, he eventually completed Maria Golovin (1958), and for Paris, Le Dernier Sauvage (1963). Meanwhile, Barber, with whom he had made a blood pact when they were students in their teens in Philadelphia that they would never do an opera together, had persuaded him to write the libretto for the American composer's Vanessa, first performed in 1958.
However, Menotti also wanted the pleasure of creating a festival where he and his friends could present their works and those of the artists they admired. He was determined not to arrive at 50 still thinking that art was, as he put it, "just a liqueur at the dinners of the rich". After scouting around he settled on Spoleto, one of Umbria's most beautifully conserved medieval cities, with theatres that needed only restoration.
The inaugural event, a production of Verdi's Macbeth, conducted by Thomas Schippers and directed by Luchino Visconti, received a blaze of Italian and international media attention after the opening night on June 5 1958. Cult status followed, and Menotti's festival came to be considered the Edinburgh of the south.
He was happy to introduce new talents, but when the famous came to Spoleto, from John Gielgud, Nureyev and Fonteyn to Pavarotti, he would convince them to do so for token fees. Celebrated poets came to read their verses, among them Spender, Yevtushenko, Pasolini and Ginsberg. During his last years Ezra Pound, though by then virtually mute, came to the festival twice, in 1965 to attend a performance of his musical composition Le Testament, with words by François Villon, and a year later, when he movingly found the strength to mumble some of his verses during a recital by Gregory Corso and other Beat poets. Dance was given pride of place from the outset, and Jerome Robbins's presence with his company in the early years helped the Italians to discover modern dance.
The festival became a showcase for new trends in theatre, both European and American. Both Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee tried out new plays there and some of the leading off-Broadway companies made their European debuts at Spoleto. Famous artists' designs for the festival posters, such as those by Richard Lindner, Ben Shahn, David Hockney and Willem De Kooning, became collector's items.
In 1962, an exhibition of modern sculpture, tastefully arranged and illuminated in the city's medieval squares and alleys, was an inspired idea. Several pieces, including one by Henry Moore, who designed the sets for Menotti's production of Don Giovanni in 1968, remained as part of Spoleto's natural scenery.
Inevitably, the many months needed every year for the festival organisation became more and more of a sacrifice for Menotti, even if he engaged artistic directors of great prestige to help him out. The problems began when American millionaires and Italian politicians began to lose interest. He paid a price in terms of his own career as a composer. Though he had inaugurated the fourth festival with the Barber-Menotti Vanessa, he did not present one of his own compositions until the 11th festival, The Saint of Bleecker Street. He also staged excellent revivals of his established successes, and of some of his later operas such as La Loca (1979), about the Spanish Queen Juana, and Goya (1986).
During the heyday of American sponsorship the festival doubled itself in Charleston, South Carolina, and there was even a stint at Melbourne, but Menotti never carried out his threat to move it elsewhere in Italy, even when plagued by disputes with local authorities or a growing tiredness in media coverage. He handed over the management to Francis, his adopted son, known as "Chip", whom he had first met when as a young actor he had played the mute Toby in a production of The Medium.
Menotti Junior had difficulty in winning the confidence or sympathy of Spoleto, and the elder Menotti continued to be a vital charismatic presence and influence at every festival. However, at the 49th festival last year, Gian Carlo was not present for the customary celebrations for his birthday. Some years ago he set up a home at Yester House, East Lothian, where Francis lives with his family.
· Gian Carlo Menotti, composer, born July 7 1911; died February 1 2007
