Amahl & The Night Visitors(Part-2) by Gian Carlo Menotti on 1952 RCA Victor LP.

From the 1951 NBC-TV broadcast of "Amahl & The Night Visitors" Christmas performance.

Transferred to digital using stereo components on channel background photo. CAST AND PERSONAL FOR THE 1951 PRODUCTION: Chet Allen ... Amahl, Rosemary Kuhlmann ... Mother, David Aiken ... First King (Melchior), Leon Lishner ... Second King (Balthazar), Andrew McKinley ... Third King (Kaspar), Francis Monachino ... The Page, Melissa Hayden ... Shepherdess, Glen Tetley ... Shepherd, Nicholas Magallanes ... Shepherd, Nelson Case ... Himself as Host, Dirk Wayne Summer ... Cast Member 1951-1952, David Winters ... Jacques, Selena Royle ... Cast Member 1951-1952.

Amahl and the Night Visitors is an opera in one act by Gian Carlo Menotti with an original English libretto by the composer.It was commissioned by NBC and first performed on December 24, 1951 in New York City, at NBC-TV studio 8H at Rockefeller Center, where it was broadcast live on television as a debut production of the Hallmark Hall of Fame. It was the first opera specifically arranged for television in America. The opera is now a popular Christmas classic, and shown on a few networks during the Christmas season, although you may have to search hard to find it.

Original 1951 Production:

Menotti had been commissioned by Peter Herman Adler, director of NBC's new opera programing, to write the first opera for television eighteen months before it was to be broadcast, but was having trouble finding a subject about which to write. One day, while walking through the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, he happened to see The Adoration of the Magi by Hieronymus Bosch and knew he had found his inspiration. There was so little time left before the premiere, that the singers had little time to rehearse, receiving the final passages of the score just days before the broadcast. The composer's companion Samuel Barber was brought in to complete the orchestrations.

Menotti originally wrote Amahl and the Night Visitors for a live stage production, even though it was intended for TV broadcast. Writing an opera is a big effort and to give it away for one performance is stupid. The composer himself appeared on TV in the very first production to introduce the opera and give the background of events leading up to his composition of it. He also brought out director Kirk Browning and conductor Thomas Schippers on camera to thank them. Amahl was seen on 35 NBC affiliated TV stations coast to coast, the largest network hookup for an opera broadcast up to that date in early TV broadcasting days. An estimated five million people saw the live broadcast, which was the largest audience ever to see a live televised opera.

Amahl and the Night Visitors was the first network television Christmas special to become an annual tradition. There had already been several television productions of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol since about 1947, but they had not been shown annually or presented by the same television network, with the same general technical staff. Amahl was always presented on NBC, with many of the same singers and technical staff every year. From 1951 until 1966.

For several years it was assumed that the original telecast, preserved on kinescope, had been lost, but a surviving copy was found, transferred to video, and is now available at The Paley Center for Media (Previous title was "The Museum of Television & Radio") and on the Internet at the Museum of Broadcast Communications. There are also several audio recordings available, such as the original 1952 RCA Victor Red Seal LP made from the soundtrack you are listening to now.

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[Hanny927]

Thank you for posting this in all its parts and the history. Listening to the LP on a huge console "record player" with my family is still one of my most cherished memories of Christmas!