Word: boito
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Arrigo Boito's Mefistofele may be an exception. Toscanini admired it. Great bassos love to strip to the waist and storm through it. Famous prima donnas long to play at being beautiful and abandoned in it. The Metropolitan Opera has hinted at doing it for decades, but when the New York City Opera presented it last week, it was the first time that New Yorkers were able to see the opera performed with full stage trappings in 43 years...
Grappling with Goethe. What they saw was a flawed masterpiece. Composers from Berlioz to Richard Adler and Jerry Ross have grappled with the Faust legend-the extent of their genius measurable by the magnitude of their failure. Boito, at least, approaches Goethe as an equal, his Prologue and Epilogue conjuring up infinities of space, time and the magnitude of Heaven...
...York City Opera's production reflected the music in a swirling fantasy of galaxies, bursting stars and mythic clouds. If the production dragged, it is partly because Boito's talent for invoking the superhuman exceeded his skill at projecting the merely mortal...
Goethe lifted the Faust legend into the realm of cosmic philosophizing. Philosophy, though, is a literary rather than a musical exercise. Music can, on occasion, state a case, but it cannot argue the point. In the end, Boito simply tried to present more Goethe than any composer could hope to cope with...
...purely scenic means, the City Opera helped raise Boito to the realm of the abstract. Set Designer David Mitchell and Stage Director Tito Capobianco placed the Prologue not in Heaven but in space. The Epilogue suggests Earth as a dying planet illuminated by the corpse of a setting sun. The production was strongly cast in other major roles. Carol Neblett, a vocally arresting but inexperienced soprano, did both Margherita and Helen of Troy. As Faust, Tenor Robert Nagy sang powerfully but with obvious effort. Julius Rudel's conducting rose successfully to the peaks but tended to coast through...