Sixty-five years ago premiered The Consul, an English-language opera in three acts.  It won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 1950, enhancing the growing reputation of its young composer and librettist, Gian Carlo Menotti (1911-2007).  A performance for television in 1960 is available on DVD.  That version recreated the original production, and Patricia Neway brilliantly reprised her role as Magda Sorel, the central figure in the opera.  Central, that is, unless one counts the looming presence of the never seen and unnamed Consul.

The Consul is set in a police state somewhere behind the Iron Curtain.  Menotti said that he got the idea for The Consul when he read a newspaper story about a woman in an Eastern Bloc country who was denied a visa to the United States and then committed suicide.  Menotti transformed that fleeting and tragic news item into a powerful and enduring work of art.

The late twentieth century saw topical operas by another American composer, John Adams, works such as Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer.  Controversial from their first performances, they will probably fade from the repertoire once people have forgotten the historical events on which those operas were based.  Meanwhile, Menotti’s The Consul will endure because of its timeless, almost mythological or fairy tale, quality.  In order to appreciate The Consul, one need never have heard of the news report that had inspired Menotti.

In the 1950s and 1960s, The Consul spoke to the fears and tensions of the Cold War.  In 2000, when Menotti directed a revival of The Consul at Kennedy Center, it fit into current debates about immigration.  All the while, The Consul transcends passing political worries and addresses perennial themes such as the duty a citizen owes his country, the state’s tendency to turn humans into numbers, the instinct of parents to provide for the security of their children.

In a large city in a totalitarian state in Europe, Magda Sorel lives in a small, walk-up flat with her husband, their baby, and her widowed mother.  Magda’s husband, John, is a critic of the oppressive regime, and because he attended a clandestine midnight meeting that had been raided, he is on the run from the authorities.

As plain clothes police officers arrive to search his residence, he hides on a ledge on the roof of the apartment.  The chief inspector questions Magda and tries to intimidate her with menacing, double-edged lines such as, “We like to give people a second chance,” “We could leave you alone if you would prove to be of help,” and “We shall see each other again.”

Once the police have gone, John climbs back inside and prepares to flee that night for the frontier.  Driven by fear for her family’s safety, Magda obeys John’s parting instructions and goes the next day to the consulate to apply for a visa for her family to leave the country.

At the consulate, she encounters the slow, heartless routine of any bureaucracy.  With several other aspiring emigrants, Magda must wait to see the Consul while a lone secretary sits at her typewriter and processes paperwork.  To an elderly man who has been retuning day after day, the secretary explains, “It isn’t our fault if you never bring the necessary documents.”  In answer to Magda’s repeated pleas, the secretary reminds Magda of the inflexible procedure:  “Your name is a number, your story’s a case, your need a request, your hopes will be filed.  Come back next week.”

Among the desperate people waiting day after day in that dreary office is a man claiming to be a famous magician.  He regales the secretary with his resume and attempts to charm her with magic tricks.  She tries to retain her cold façade but is clearly flustered by his antics, nothing ever covered in the training manual, and to his chagrin he realizes that confronted with such a resolute gatekeeper, there can be no magic word, no “Open sesame.”

Like the magician and the others, Magda must come back each day and fill out new forms.  Worn down by months of waiting to see the Consul, Magda despairs.  Her husband is a fugitive, her baby has died, her mother is dying, and the secret police patrol outside her flat.  All because the country she loves has become a prison.

At the end of Act Two, Magda sings a show-stopping aria, “To this we’ve come.”  She laments to the secretary, “If to them, not to God, we now must pray,/tell me, Secretary, tell me,/who are these men? . . . Who are these dark archangels?/ . . . Is there one—anyone behind those doors/to whom the heart can still be explained?/ . . . I ask you for help,/and all you give me is papers!”  The person left unmoved by Magda’s anguish is but a fist clenched around a hammer and sickle.

For close to seventy years some critics have disdained Menotti’s operas as second-rate Puccini.  Moreover, since Menotti’s operas are in English, those critics dismiss them as merely quaint operettas.  Menotti himself billed The Consul as “a musical drama,” hoping to attract a wider audience beyond the standard white-tie opera society crowd.

Still, there are worse fates than being labeled a poor man’s Puccini, and people who avoid opera because they cannot understand Italian (or French or German) have no excuse with Menotti’s works.  Like Puccini’s Tosca, Menotti’s The Consul explores themes of love, faith, and loyalty bullied and crushed under a dictatorship.  Unlike Tosca, there is no need for subtitles.  Opera distills human nature to elements common to us all and need not be obscure to be great.

A year after composing The Consul, Menotti wrote the first opera for television, Amahl and the Night Visitors.  Ever since, whether on stage or the small screen, it has been a favorite parable for Christmas.  Amahl’s tale is happier than Magda’s, but both characters reveal deep truths about family and faith, as well as about hope and love.  Menotti was a deeply religious man, yet he was full of questions and doubts.  As an artist, he used his inner struggles to shape his work; Menotti understood human nature and how to express its fears and desires in beautiful words and music.

 

Daniel J. Heisey, O. S. B, is a Benedictine monk of Saint Vincent Archabbey, Latrobe, Pennsylvania, where he is known as Brother Bruno.  He teaches Church History at Saint Vincent Seminary.