Word: boito
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Collaboration is the lifeblood of the musical theater: Mozart and Da Ponte, Verdi and Boito, Strauss and Hofmannsthal. But posthumous collaboration has had to wait until the advent of the phonograph, motion pictures and the camcorder. Today the late George Gershwin can play Rhapsody in Blue with Michael Tilson Thomas, Natalie Cole can sing a duet with her deceased dad Nat King Cole--and composer Philip Glass can write a trilogy of operas with the French author, aesthete and movie director Jean Cocteau, dead since...
...hamper of dirty laundry to escape a jealous husband, the portly knight gets ignominiously flung into the Thames. "Oh, oh, oh," he finally cries as the supposedly merry wives of Windsor burn him with their tapers. In setting this black comedy to music, Verdi and his librettist, Arrigo Boito, degrade the hero still further. "Lord, make him impotent," the women chorus as everyone flails and pummels the fallen hero. And yet after his punishment on the stage of the Brooklyn Academy of Music last week, a wonderful thing happened. Falstaff mysteriously rose above his tormentors and soared into space...
...sandy-haired, blue-eyed Ramey cuts a commanding figure onstage. Although shy in private life, he is physically fearless in front of an audience; the burst of acrobatic twisting, leaping and rolling with which Ramey depicts the devil's discomfiture at the end of Arrigo Boito's Mefistofele is one of the most breathtaking spectacles in contemporary opera performance. European companies clamor for his services; two summers ago, the Paris Opera staged a vivid production of Giacomo Meyerbeer's 19th century spectral curiosity, Robert le Diable, just...
...ciel is one of the biggest climaxes in a score that sometimes seems to be nothing but climaxes. But Verdi and Librettist Arrigo Boito knew that after the massive choral scene in Act III, enough was enough. Hence the rightness of the subdued, wistfully melancholy fourth act, a sort of spacious postlude. This act is Desdemona's great moment. Soprano Gilda Cruz-Romo made the most of it, although in the earlier acts her singing had somewhat lacked color and shading. Poignant and dignified, she spun out the Willow Song and Desdemona's final prayer in long, crystalline...
...known as "the Chaplain of Bourbon Street"; his first lead role at City Opera, a guilt-haunted, Bible-pounding minister in Carlisle Floyd's Susannah, was based on those early experiences. Treigle's gaunt face and spidery figure virtually typecast him for such roles as Mephistopheles in Boito's and Gounod's versions of the Faust legend, and as the four villains in Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann...