Gian Carlo Menotti died Feb. 1, producing barely a blip on the pop culture screen. A subscriber to AOL, I’ve noticed with irritation that every time a minor pop culture figure dies, it rates a headline on AOL’s homepage. We’re not talking Anna Nicole here, but more like–I don’t know–the drummer for a long‑forgotten ‘60s band, or the second assistant gaffer for “Wayne’s World 2.” (Apologies to the second gaffer for “Wayne’s World 2,” if there was one, for spreading premature rumors of his/her passing.)

But Menotti? Nothing. Unless the search engine at azcentral.com is hiding something, The Arizona Republic ran no obit. Even The New York Times’ death notice was a modest affair. Chalk it up to our society’s disdain for the elderly, if you wish, since Menotti was 95. But I believe it’s indicative of a gap much wider than age: the chasm between quality and celebrity.

Since Menotti was not, in the contemporary sense, a celebrity, I should probably explain to you who he was. If you’ve heard only one opera that was composed to an English‑language libretto, chances are that opera was Menotti’s “Amahl and the Night Visitors.” Menotti composed its music to his own libretto in 1951 on commission from, of all things, a television network. NBC paid Menotti to write an opera for the Christmas season, and when the result was broadcast, millions watched: the biggest single audience for an opera, ever.

Imagine NBC, or HBO, or USA doing that today. People are still writing new operas, but their appearances on TV are rare, and when they do occur, they appear within the high‑culture ghetto of PBS. “Amahl and the Night Visitors” was written for everyone, not just opera aficionados. And everyone loved it.

They still do. The story of a little boy who gives an unlikely gift to the Christ child remains the most popular opera ever composed to an English‑language libretto, with hundreds of productions worldwide every year. (The most recent one in the Valley was by Arizona State University in 2005.)

But Menotti was not a one‑opera wonder. His 1950 masterpiece, “The Consul,” won the Pulitzer Prize for its gripping depiction of bureaucracy’s darker corners. Joel Revzen, general director of Arizona Opera, introduced the work to Phoenix in the spring of 2005; Revzen’s performance (with another company) of “The Consul” on compact disc is the work’s major recording.

Four years after “The Consul,” Menotti won a second Pulitzer for “The Saint of Bleecker Street,” an opera now almost entirely forgotten. And here’s the big punch line: Both “Saint” and “The Consul,” like most other Menotti operas, were first produced as commercial ventures on Broadway. Menotti’s operas were not something for specialized ears, but for anyone open‑minded enough to embrace strong stories set to dramatic, melodic music.

Somewhere between Menotti and today, all that changed. New operas no longer start on Broadway, nor do they generally involve music most people would find melodic. Living classical composers are a specialized lot, and for the most part the operas they write seem made for connoisseurs only. Little wonder that the only work for the lyric stage from the last 30 years to have found a permanent place in major opera houses is not an opera at all, but Stephen Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd,” a Broadway musical that fits the Menotti bill of a good story set to dramatic, melodic music. There’s a lesson there somewhere for American opera companies.

Menotti, born in Italy in 1911, always considered himself an American composer and always wrote his operas in English. His passing closes the book on that generation of composers who defined what it meant to write American music: Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, Samuel Barber, William Schuman, Roy Harris. They are all gone now, and outside the constantly narrowing world of classical music, they are all but forgotten.

But for any American making music today and in the future, they should stand as models of individuality. Their concern was not history, nor schools of thought, nor artistic ideologies, but communication. Each of them sought to reach the audiences of their day with something unique to themselves as artists, to say to people, “This is how I hear the world.” That’s a lesson, not for an era, but forever.