"When I listen to silence strange things happen....
to times silence seems to have no voice
to times it whispers slight sensations
but to times it cries out loud and clear
throwing messages you can′t escape,
that you can′t change because they′re inevitable
because they′re just so, and you think you can forget them but
sooner or later they come back and they always present themselves to you through
the invisible song of silence.
And so you yourself become the unavoidable spokesperson of a story,
of a memory, of a piece of memory that the more it becomes present
the more enthralling it is.
And you find yourself to being part of a drawing that has no frame, where
color dissolves into perfect shades and that could
not be different from what it is."
Silvia Priori

A journey in the footsteps of Maestro Gian Carlo Menotti, through storytelling, music, song and images. We will retrace his life, from his childhood to Cadegliano, to his arrival to New York with his countless successes, from the creation of Festival dei Due Mondi to Spoleto, to his retreats to Yester House in Scotland. A life dedicated to music, theater, art, to Spoleto. A life that erased the Ocean. A show about inspiration and love.

It is said that nothing happens by accident. I don't really know how it happened to living in the Villa Menotti to Cadegliano but I remember that when I called him to Spoleto in ′94 to introduce myself, he in an excited voice told me that he was happy to know that in that house, where he was born and wrote his first opera, artists lived. from then the locals told me a thousand stories about the Maestro's life, I like to listen to their anecdotes, I like to knock on their doors and go in search of small information hidden in the folds of the memory of the old men of the village.

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Anniva, is 77 years old, lives on Ainèe street up to go to Viconago, she was born in the Villa Menotti, her parents were
part of the servants, her father cared for the animals and the park, her mother made from food. Anniva is called that because it was " the Gian Carlo" as she calls him to keep her to baptism..." he didn′t know what name to give me and since there was also the Sam ( Samuel Barber) it was he to told him to name me after his sister Anniva. She always lived in the mansion and every now and then she remembers the phone calls to late at night from the Master arriving from New York, asking her to prepare potatoes and cheese for him and the American dancers and after a while they were all sitting on the floor next to the piano to eating and to playing.

L′IDEA
How many people have loved music so much and how many have put themselves at the service of a community with such dedication?
A life, that of Gian Carlo Menotti, that has stemmed between two worlds: "America and Europe," "composing operas and organizing festivals."
from one side his need to seek inspiration for new works and on the other the intimate need to feel useful to a community.
And so around the age of fifty Menotti rebelled against the idea of art as a form of entertainment, he was tired of thinking of the artist as the jester of society, he wanted to feel that the artist could be a fundamental part of it.
And so he sought out a place that needed him: Spoleto!
An artist has an altruistic urge in him, he puts to his whole self at the disposal of the creation of anopera art. Menotti sacrificed everything, his artistic passion, his need to write, create and compose music for something more urgent: to be useful to a community.
Urgency with which, however, he found himself struggling several times to as a man and as an artist.
Spoleto fulfilled a dream of his!
What is certain is that his life was always in pursuit of something beyond vanity, popularity and gratification.
"Knowledge, knowledge, yes. To be aware -- to know what music is. To know why I am alive, why I will have to die...to know what beauty is. All these things I haven't found yet: this search that goes on.... If someone asked me how I would like to die, I would tell him that I would like to die with a question on my lips, so that death can give me its luminous answer."
Menotti was a revolutionary in spite of himself, he just wanted to be fully himself.
The revolutionary thing is that he never followed any school, any fashion: "I only followed my inner voice, I expressed myself as I wanted to express myself."
And therein lies his absolute originality: he followed himself truthfully without pretending what he is not. The difficult thing is "to have the courage to be oneself with simplicity, humanity, compassion and love." The inevitability of art. to he liked art that is inevitable, that is, in which one cannot change anything. If you can change things, you have not found the inevitable. Great art is inevitable: it cannot be anything but that! And the more inevitable it is, the more beautiful it is.

MULTIMEDIA CONCERT THEATER
A multimedia concert theater featuring Silvia Priori, - a graduate of the "Paolo Grassi" School of Dramatic Art in Milan, as the lead actress, accompanied by the singing of Francesca Cappelletti, soprano, the latest discovery of Maestro Gian Carlo Menotti, and the Ensemble of the "G. Verdi" Conservatory of Milan directed from Marco Seco, who will perform some pieces by Gian Carlo Menotti and Samuel Barber.

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