Amahl i nocni goście

"This is an opera for children, because it attempts to recreate my own childhood. You see, when I was a child, I lived in Italy, and in Italy, there is no Santa Claus. I suppose that Santa Claus is too busy with American children to have time for Italian children. Our gifts were brought to us by the Three Wise Men. (...) I owe the Three Wise Men, above all, the joyful Christmas of my childhood, and I should have been very grateful to them. Instead, I came to America and soon forgot about them, because here, during the Christmas season, there are so many Santa Clauses scattered all over the city. Add to this the giant Christmas tree on Rockefeller Plaza, the glittering shop windows on Fifth Avenue, the hundred-voice choir at Grand Central Station, the countless carols on the radio and television – and it all made me forget about the three expensive, old kings from my childhood. But in 1951, I found myself in a difficult situation. I received a commission from the National Broadcasting Company to write an opera for television, with a deadline of Christmas, and I had no idea what to do. One November afternoon, while wandering rather listlessly through the halls of the Metropolitan Museum, I happened to stop in front of Hieronymus Bosch's painting, "Adoration of the Magi," and as I looked at it, I suddenly heard again, coming from the distant blue hills, the strange song of the Three Wise Men. Then I realized that they had come back to me and brought me a gift." This is how Gian-Carlo Menotti described his inspiration for creating the opera "Amahl and the Night Visitors" in the original program notes. Menotti emphasized that when working on "Amahl," he was not thinking about the properties of a television studio (which offered completely new possibilities for visual representation). His goal was universality, characteristic of "the ideal stage, which has no counterpart in reality." The staging of "Amahl and the Night Visitors" was taken on by Włodzimierz Nurkowski. For the Krakow Opera, he has staged productions such as "The Rape of Lucretia," "Jaś i Małgosia," "Pan Marimba," "Cabaret Lunaire," "Orpheus in Hell," "Gianni Schicchi/Pajace," "The Turk in Italy," "First Wrinkle," and "Ariadne on Naxos." What will his vision of Menotti's "television opera" be?