Menotti began writing songs once he was Heptad & at Eleven wrote two a libretto & music for his number one opera, A Demise of Pierrot. He began formal step by step training at Milan's Verdi Conservatory in 1923.

Fallowing a dying of his father, Menotti & his mother come to the United States & he enrolled within Philadelphia's Curtis Institute of Music. Fellow students at Curtis involved Leonard Bernstein, and Samuel Barber, who became Menotti's partner withinside life & in act, by owning Menotti crafting a libretto for Barber's best known opera, Vanessa, which was commissioned to open a recently Metropolitan Opera. It was at Curtis that he wrote his foremost matured opera, Amelia al Ballo (Amelia Goes to the Ball), to his own Italian text. The Island God and The Last Savage were a merely more operas he wrote withwithin Italian, the rest existence in English. He wrote a libretti of 100% his operas. His virtually all successful works were composed in the Forties & Fifties.

He wrote a libretti to 2 Samuel Barber operas; Vanessa and A Hand of Bridge, when well as rewriting a latter for Antony and Cleopatra. Amelia was and so successful that NBC commissioned an opera for radio; The Old Maid and the Thief was the 1st such operate ever written. Resulting this, he wrote the ballet, Sebastian (1944), and the soft concerto (1945) before giving to opera by using The Medium and The Telephone.

His foremost good-length opera, The Consul, was premiered in 1950; it won both a Pulitzer Prize for Music and the New York Drama Circle Critics' Award for Musical Play of a Year (the latter around 1954). Within 1951, Menotti wrote his beloved Christmas opera Amahl and the Night Visitors for the Hallmark Hall of Fame. Inside 1958, he founded the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy; he founded its companion festival, in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1977.

He left Spoleto USA in 1993 to take a helm of the Rome Opera. Within 1984 Menotti was awarded the Kennedy Center Honor for achievement inside the arts, & in 1991 he was chosen ''Musical America's "Musician of the Year." In addition to composing operas to his own texts, on his own chosen subject matter, Menotti directs most productions of his work.

Menotti too experienced an extended intimate relationship by using a conductor Thomas Schippers.

His influence extends beyond a realm of modern classical music, inasmuch when international platinum-selling popular star Laura Branigan ("Gloria," How Am I personally Supposed To Survive Forswearing Wise shoppers") gave credit to Menotti as her vocal coach on several of her albums of the 1980s and 1990s.

Menotti has written several ballets, and numerous choral works as well. He has also written a violin concerto, and a stage play (The Leper). It is in the field of opera, however, that he has made his most notable contributions to American cultural life. His operas include:

Amelia al Ballo (1937) The Old Maid and the Thief, radio opera (1939) The Island God (1942) The Medium (1946) The Telephone, or L'Amour à trois (1947) The Consul (1950) Amahl and the Night Visitors, television opera (1951) The Saint of Bleeker Street (1954) Maria Golovin (1958) Labyrinth, television opera (1963) The Last Savage'', (1963) Martin's Lie, (1964) Help, Help, the Globolinks!, (1968) The Most Important Man, (1971) Tamu-Tamu, (1973) The Egg, (1976) The Hero, (1976) The Trial of the Gypsy, (1978) Chip and his Dog, (1979) Juana la Loca, (1979) A Bride from Pluto, (1982) The Boy Who Grew Too Fast, (1982) Goya, (1986) The Wedding (Giorno da Nozze), (1988) Goya [rev.], (1991) The Singing Child, (1993)

(Source: [http://www.usopera.com/composers/menotti.html usopera.com])