100 years ago -- Birthday of Gian Carlo Menotti

from NPR dot-org glowing tribute to the Italian-American composer and musical pioneer:

Is composer Gian Carlo Menotti (born 100 years ago July 7) ready to be ranked with the greatest 20th-century composers?
One hundred years ago, in a country town on Italy's Lake Lugano, Gian Carlo Menotti was born. It didn't take long before little Gian Carlo took pen to music paper. By the time he entered the Milan Conservatory at age 13, he'd already composed two operas.
On the 100th anniversary of the composer's birth, Morning Edition music commentator Miles Hoffman makes a case for Menotti as one of the greatest musicians of the 20th century.
"He was a pioneer," Hoffman says. "He came to this country as a teenager, studied at the Curtis Institute and had courage to write operas in English, starting in the 1930s, when no other American really did. Certainly, no other American composer was able to do it so successfully."
Hoffman says Menotti was also a media pioneer. After considerable success with his first opera in America, the composer was approached by NBC to write a work specifically for radio. On April 22, 1939, Menotti's The Old Maid and the Thief was broadcast. Later, Menotti found even greater success with Amahl and the Night Visitors, the first opera commissioned for television. It made its debut on NBC on Dec. 24, 1951, and became a Christmas Eve broadcast tradition. The roles were carefully crafted so that amateurs as well as professionals could perform the work, rendering it one of the most performed operas.
But should Menotti be ranked with the composer heavyweights of the 20th century, like Stravinsky, Copland, Shostakovich, Schoenberg and Messiaen? Hoffman says he thinks so.
"You have to ask the question, 'Who wrote music that will last — music that people will be listening to 100, 200 years from now?'" Hoffman says. "I believe one of the answers will be Gian Carlo Menotti."

http://www.npr.org/blogs/deceptivecadence/2011/07/07/137649623/making-a-case-for-menotti