FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Composer/lyricist Gian Carlo Menotti wrote these lines in 1950 for his Pulitzer Prize-winning opera, The Consul, to be presented in November by San Francisco's ``cabaret opera'' company, Goat Hall Productions. The Consul opens Friday, Nov. 2 and runs through Sunday, Nov. 18, with performances Friday and Saturday (and Thursday, Nov. 15) at 8 p.m., Sundays at 2:00 p.m., at Goat Hall, 400 Missouri St. at 19th on Potrero Hill.

Menotti wrote some of his most haunting and beautiful music for this tale of revolutionaries and refugees at the mercy of a faceless bureaucracy. A freedom fighter, John Sorel, must flee an unnamed dictatorship, leaving his wife Magda with his mother and their infant son. The action centers on Magda's visits to a consulate (assumed to be the U.S.) to plead for a visa so she can join John. Other desperate souls are there for similar reasons, but no one ever sees the Consul-only the Secretary, who ensnares them in endless bureaucratic red tape while claiming ``I'm just doing my job.'' Meanwhile, the secret police hound Magda for the names of John's cohorts, and the tragic net closes in on her.

While focusing on the fate of one person caught up in a nightmare of unintentional cruelty, Menotti's opera resonates with larger questions much on our minds today. Who is the enemy? How do we save ourselves from an outside threat, yet retain our civility, our compassion for others? Have we become a faceless, all-powerful system perceived as crushing people around the earth through our indifference? These are terrible questions and Menotti faces them squarely, finding his answers in compassion and sacrifice.

Goat Hall's Artistic Director, Harriet March Page, says, ``Little did we know when we programmed The Consul that this powerful story of doomed individuals would speak so strongly in this new world we have just been born into. I worried at first that the opera was too dark. But Menotti's passionate text and magnificent music have touched our hearts and souls in ways we couldn't have imagined before September 11.''

Menotti, in a 1999 interview, also noted that world events (back then it was the Balkans) keep catching up with his Cold War-era opera. In preparing a January 2000 production for the Kennedy Center, he said, ``I didn't have to change anything-not a word or a note. Everybody at that time [1950] said the opera would become dated, but it's a sad thing that nowadays the subject is just as vital as it was then.''

Menotti, who has lived and worked mostly in America while retaining his Italian citizenship, is best known for the holiday classic Amahl and the Night Visitors; his other most-performed operas include The Medium and The Telephone. With this production of The Consul, Goat Hall joins the music world in celebrating the composer's 90th birthday in 2001. The company has made a specialty of Menotti's works since its founding in 1997, because, says March Page, ``they embody everything we love about musical theater: beautiful music tightly wedded to powerful drama, on contemporary themes, sung in plain English.''

William Susman, writing in the journal 21st-Century Music, says that ``Goat Hall Productions with its innovative programs is proving to be an essential part of the San Francisco music scene.''

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