Music: Madrigal & Mime

Onstage, dancers pranced about in the guise of poets, unicorns and gorgons. In the pit, a chorus sang words as the dancers gestured in silent mime. On the end seat of a row up front, Composer Gian Carlo Menotti (Saint of Bleecker Street, Amahl and the Night Visitors) nervously twisted a piece of paper in his hands and silently moved his lips, for no composer in modern times had tried a musical brew quite like the strange goings-on in that Washington auditorium last week. It was Composer Menotti’s latest opus, The Unicorn, the Gorgon, and the Manticore,† or The Three Sundays of a Poet, “a madrigal fable for chorus, ten dancers and nine instruments.”

Remembered Beasts. The work was almost not performed at all. Commissioned last year by the Library of Congress to compose something for the twelfth chamber-music festival of the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation, Menotti remembered the story-telling madrigal cycles of Orazio (L’Amfiparnaso) Vecchi, a 16th century Italian. He dug out an old script he once wrote after reading The Book of Beasts, began to plot a work that is part masque, part ballet, part chamber music. But Menotti never puts notes on paper till the last minute, was sending madrigals to Choreographer John Butler as he finished them, did not complete the final one until a week before the premiere. The ballet’s first run-through came only four days before the public was to see it. At the last minute Conductor Thomas Schippers announced he could not conduct because, as Menotti admitted, “he has to conduct at the Met next week, and still has half of my work to learn.” Paul Callaway, organist of Washington Cathedral, had to be drafted on short notice to conduct the première before a tough audience of top-rank musicians, critics and composers.

Chained Fancies. In twelve madrigals, six orchestral interludes and a march, Menotti tells a pointed tale of a poet who lives in a castle, yawns at town meetings, and goes neither to church nor to the local countess’ parties. When he is seen one Sunday leading a unicorn by a silver chain, he is mocked, but soon the entire town is parading unicorns as pets. The next Sunday he is parading a gorgon, says he has “peppered and grilled” the unicorn, and soon all the pet unicorns have been killed, and gorgons are the rage. On the third Sunday the poet appears with a manticore, says the gorgon has died “of murder,” which brings the same fate to the town’s other gorgons, and manticores become the latest craze. When the poet appears no more, the townsfolk are infuriated, march on his castle to torture and kill him for his “crimes.” They find him dying, surrounded by his unicorn, gorgon and manticore, symbolizing the poet’s youth, manhood and old age. In elaborate and haunting four-voice counterpoint, the chorus, speaking for the miming poet, asks, “How could I destroy the pain-wrought children of my fancy?” The sprightly, gay, 43-minute work takes on a sweet, sad beauty as the chorus sings almost liturgically, as if each voice were a pipe in an organ.

Oh, foolish people

Who feign to feel

What other men have suffered,

You, not I, are the indifferent killers

Of the poet’s dreams.

In texture, the work was a singular and engaging combination of ancient contrapuntal harmonies and tart, modern, dramatic values. Its orchestral underpinning, on a chamber-music scale, was fresh and spare, and the ensemble ranged effectively from a quaint lightheartedness to a bittersweet melancholy. As the last note died away, the tough audience of musical pros leaped to their feet and called for one curtain call after another. At a subsequent performance for the general public, the applause was even greater. One critic predicted that the madrigal, lately as rare as unicorns or manticores, might be in for a revival. Said Menotti of his twelfth madrigal: “It is the most deeply and personally felt of anything I’ve written. It is something I would like for my own funeral.”

† The mythological unicorn is horselike and has a horn sprouting from its forehead, can be captured only by human virgins. A gorgon has the teeth of a swine, the scales of a dragon, wings and human hands. A manticore has a man’s face, blood-red eyes, three rows of teeth, a tail with a scorpion’s sting, and a voice as shrill as the high notes of a flute.