Except for such rare examples as Verdi and Monteverdi, opera composers continue working into old age at their own peril. Such is the conclusion to be drawn from the hasty obituaries of Gian Carlo Menotti (1911–2007) who died earlier this month at age 95. Misunderstandings were rife, as when Metropolitan Opera general manager Peter Gelb told the Associated Press that Menotti was “one of America’s greatest composers.” Menotti was, of course, not an American composer at all; born near Lake Lugano in Italy, he studied at the Milan Conservatory until 1928, when he moved to Philadelphia to study with another Italian composer, Rosario Scalero (1870–1954) at the Curtis Institute. Menotti never sought American citizenship, and eventually moved back to Europe after writing a series of operas in a belated verismo style owing nothing to American culture. In a peculiar twist — which may perhaps justify Mr. Gelb’s comment — President Reagan granted Menotti American citizenship for a single day in 1984, so that he could be a Kennedy Center honoree.

Menotti’s life and career were a series of similar bizarre exceptions. At a time of arch-modernism in music, Menotti wrote defiantly tonal, easy-to-listento works, among the best of which is “Amelia Goes to the Ball,” a brisk, no-nonsense society comedy from 1937 in which a wife is determined to go to a ball, and does so. The exacting conductor Fritz Reiner led a performance of “Amelia” at Curtis, and other fine maestros were also attracted to Menotti’s early works. His 1944 ballet “Sebastian,” perhaps his finest achievement for its danceable lyricism, was recorded in its suite form by podium giants such as Dimitri Mitropoulos and Leopold Stokowski.

Menotti’s ultimate legacy may be in such instrumental works, such as his violin concerto — brilliant young Korean-American violinist Jennifer Koh has made a plausible case for this work’s sinuous, if derivative, charm. Oddly for a composer so identified with opera, Menotti’s vocal settings almost always eventually drip into distressing bathos. His beloved “Amahl and the Night Visitors” (1951), despite jolly, accessible tunes, has a mushy plot that could bring out the Grinch in any listener: Three Kings — Balthazar, Melchior, and Kaspar — are on their way to find the baby Jesus, and stay with the poor lame boy Amahl and his mother. Amahl’s mother attempts to steal some of the Kings’ gold and is forgiven; Amahl offers his crutch as a gift to the baby Jesus and miraculously can walk again. He follows the Kings in order to personally present the crutch to Jesus. These doings outschmaltz treacly religious allegory operas such as Massenet’s “The Juggler of Our Lady” (1902) while adding questionable symbolism of adored crutches — like something out of Salvador Dali — and a boy leaving home and mother to follow strange men. Sounds like something for Dateline NBC’s “To Catch a Predator” series.

Yet presumed familiarity with “Amahl” makes recent audiences willing to sit through restagings of Menotti’s dated, murky Cold War allegory “The Consul” (1950), when anyone with musical taste and an interest in an Italian composer’s take on modern history would surely find Luigi Dallapiccola’s “The Prisoner” (1944–48) more illuminating. Menotti wrote his own quaint and sometimes unidiomatic English librettos, further moving his operas away from a sense of reality, although his libretto for his longtime lover Samuel Barber’s “Vanessa” (1957) may remain Menotti’s most solid contribution to opera history. Barber (1910–1981), a vastly more refined composer than Menotti, wrote vocal works from a singer’s perspective; Barber’s “Knoxville: Summer of 1915” has a simplicity and authenticity that Menotti could never approach, especially not in his execrable latter-day star vehicles for Beverly Sills (“Juana, La Loca,” 1979) and Plácido Domingo (“Goya,” 1986). Still, the Menotti of over 60 years ago, of “Amelia Goes to the Ball” and “Sebastian,” continues to charm.