MENOTTI SEES AMBIVALENCE IN CRITICISM

Gian Carlo Menotti gently insists that the critical scorn so often heaped on his operas over the last three decades doesn’t upset him--the complaints that he indulges in easy melodrama, recycles 19th-Century musical ideas, simply doesn’t try hard enough. At 75, the still-ebullient composer of “The Medium,” “The Saint of Bleeker Street” and last year’s “Goya” just shakes his head, smiles wearily and bemoans “America’s ambivalence toward her cultural idols.”

But he maintains that he has a devoted public following. In fact, he adds, his one artistic regret is not giving the world more Menotti operas and less time as an opera director.

“I wish I’d never started staging operas,” he said in an interview this week in Costa Mesa. “It has taken so much time away from my composing. . . . I have wasted so much of my time directing other people’s work.”

But directing--which he admits he does mostly for the money--is what brings him to Southern California this spring. His staging of Puccini’s “La Boheme,” presented by Opera Pacific, opens Saturday night at the Orange County Performing Arts Center. Other performances are on March 30, April 1 and April 4. He is directing two of his own operas, “The Medium” and “The Telephone,” for the San Diego Opera, to be offered in May.

The names Puccini and Menotti were paired in several major reviews of Menotti’s most recent work, “Goya,” based on the struggles of the Spanish painter and premiered by the Washington Opera last November. “Reheated Puccini,” is how Los Angeles Times music critic Martin Bernheimer described the work. “A Little Puccini and Water,” said Newsweek.

Undaunted, Menotti admits to a certain influence from Puccini, expressing “a reverent envy” for “La Boheme.”

“Of all the operas by Puccini, the one I really love is only ‘Boheme,’ ” he said of the 1896 work, set amid the artistic milieu of the Parisian Latin Quarter.

“I don’t think he ever was able to achieve again the perfection of ‘Boheme,’ ” Menotti continued. “The people speak melodically from the very first note to the last. It is what Wagner tried to achieve, what we all try to achieve. And not even Puccini was able to achieve it again. It is a miraculous opera and of course it had a great influence in my life.

“The whole life of a composer is a search for the perfection that other people have achieved. I am Beethoven. I am Wagner. I am Debussy. I am Puccini. I am everyone who has come before me.”

Menotti’s first adult opera, “Amelia Goes to the Ball,” premiered in 1937. For nearly 20 years he often enjoyed a rare alloy of public and critical success that then faded despite two Pulitzer Prizes, in 1950 for “The Consul” and in 1955 for “The Saint of Bleeker Street.”

Menotti started directing with the first production of “The Medium,” in 1946, out of unhappiness with other people’s handling of his work. Over the years, he has been busy as a director all over the world and sometimes relies heavily on assistants to mount his productions.

For example, while Opera Pacific bills the Orange County production as “directed by Gian Carlo Menotti,” all the directorial details for more than two weeks have been handled by a Menotti protege, Roman Terleckyj. The sets date from a 1981 Menotti production at the Washington Opera. When Menotti arrived at his first Costa Mesa rehearsal Monday night, the cast seemed well-rehearsed.

Opera Pacific spokesman John Finck said tenor Jerry Hadley, as the poet Rodolfo, is the only member of the Costa Mesa cast who performed in the Washington Opera version. But Menotti said that doesn’t matter and described Terleckyj as “very loyal, very faithful to my conception.” He said a week was plenty of time to put his individual stamp on what audiences will see: “This production is 100% Menotti, I assure you of that.”

It is common, Menotti added, for an opera director’s ideas to be realized by an assistant, but he said he likes to be present as much as possible because every singer works differently. For example, he compared directing the slender Hadley as Rodolfo to directing the generously sized Luciano Pavarotti in the same role.

“Hadley can do anything you tell him,” said Menotti. “With Pavarotti, you tell him to bend down, and he says, ‘I can’t bend down.’ You tell him to climb the stairs, and he says, ‘I can’t climb the stairs.’ ”

Born to an affluent family in Cadegliano, Italy, Menotti spent most of his mature years in the United States, studying at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music between 1927 and 1933. For 30 years, he made his home in Mt. Kisco, N.Y., with composer Samuel Barber, who died in 1981. Now, he resides in a baronial castle on 72 acres in Lothian, Scotland, with his adopted son, the former Francis (Chip) Phelan, an occasional actor in Menotti’s operas who sat in on the interview in Costa Mesa.

Quietly attentive throughout the hourlong interview, the younger Menotti, who is in his late 30s, helped when the composer struggled for the words. At one point, when Menotti was asked the color of his eyes, it was his adopted son who said that they were gray or green, depending on the light.

There is a pampered theatricality to Menotti--glimpses of real sensitivity but also the rehearsed vulnerability of one who has talked about himself in many interviews. “I am a searcher,” he declared, asked to briefly describe himself. Then, his long face reflected unhappiness at his answer. The aquiline nose tilted back as his eyes searched the ceiling.

“I would say I have an inexhaustible curiosity. . . . I am a man who has guilt in his life. I am guilty of some things.”

What things?

“I won’t tell you.”

The younger Menotti leaned forward and said, “Like Goya, Gian Carlo . . . tell him it’s like Goya,” clearly referring to Menotti’s conception of Goya as a great artist ridden by personal guilt.

Menotti looked at his adopted son and lowered his head. “I suffer from a sense of guilt about myself, about what I should have done in my life. I feel guilty about my vanity as a man. We are all so vain.”

He falls silent.

What should he have done that he hasn’t?

“I have wasted too much time. The (critical) onslaught on the ‘Goya’ seems to have gotten a great reaction to my music all over. At Juilliard, in Germany, they want to do my music. In Bulgaria! They offered me the whole of Bulgaria if I come there to do my works. They offered me chorus and orchestra. Everything! I wish I wasn’t so busy. Then I could get some rest.”