[FAC] California Opera: Amahl and the Night Visitors

[Diane Nixon]

California Opera Association presents the holiday classic Amahl and the Night Visitors at the Fresno Art Museum for Family Day this Saturday, December 5th at 11 AM and 12 Noon.  Admission is free and includes museum tour, children's art activities, face painting, and puppeteer performances following morning events.   Future performances of the California Opera Association's 2009-10 Amahl and the Night Visitors include several daytime matinee performances scheduled for school children during December and January, December 11th 3 PM and 7 PM performances at St. George Greek Orthodox Church and Sunday December 13th at 4 PM at the Fox Theatre in Hanford.  For more information, please call 225-6737 (CAL-OPERA) or 761-1644. 

The tender, heartwarming story of Amahl and the Night Visitors, is one of the most popular of American operas. It is performed internationally every Christmas season and remains one of the most frequently performed operas of the 20th century. Expressly written for television it premiered on NBC on Christmas Eve, 1951 and was repeated thereafter for sixteen Christmas seasons. 

 

Amahl and the Night Visitors was composed by the late Italian composer Gian Carlo Menotti who as a young boy became lame. The doctors had no cure for him. He was taken to be blessed at the holy Sanctuary of Sacro Monte and thereafter, miraculously, the young Menotti was cured of lameness. When NBC commissioned Menotti to write a Christmas opera he despaired until one day, while strolling through the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, he chanced upon and was inspired by the famous painting "The Adoration of the Magi." The idea of the Night Visitors was born and he wrote into it some of the magical sounds he remembered from his youth during St. Nicholas's festive visits to his mountain village in Italy. 

 

One hour in length, the opera in English, with its beautiful score and touching libretto, is appealing to all ages and musical backgrounds. The opera was written specifically for young imaginations which can easily relate to a child with a head full of dreams, and remains an inspiring story of how faith, charity, unselfish love and good deeds can work miracles. 

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