On Christmas Eve in 1951, NBC television broadcast live the world premiere performance of Gian Carlo Menotti’s opera, Amahl and the Night Visitors. Now, for decades the kinescope recording of that original live transmission was thought to be lost, but miraculously, a copy resurfaced just in time for Amahl’s 50th anniversary and was shown at the Museum of Television and Radio in Beverly Hills in December of 2001.

On the broadcast, the dapper Menotti can be seen introducing the new work, confessing that NBC had commissioned the opera in 1950, but its wasn’t until the Thanksgiving of 1951 that he actually began working on it, inspired by the painting “The Adoration of the Magi,” which he saw at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. In fact, Menotti was working on his new score up to the last minute, delivering it bit by bit to the performers prior to its premiere.

The opera proved a hit, and for the next five years became an annual live holiday broadcast on NBC.

NBC continued to air Amahl occasionally through the 1970s, but by that time it had become an established seasonal tradition for both professional and amateur performers coast to coast.

Gian Carlo Menotti (1911-2007): Amahl and the Night Visitors Suite; The New Zealand Symphony; Andrew Schenck, conductor; Koch 7005