Word: boito
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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...
...secret of Falstaff's miraculous funnies doesn't end there. The phenomenon of Falstaff is that the composer, Verdi, and his librettist, Boito, changed roles. Verdi composed like a playwright and Boito wrote like a musician. Take away all the words from Falstaff and you will still know exactly what is going on. When the orchestra trills from one end to the other, you know that Falstaff has just taken a colossal chug of wine which is going to work on his insides; when the trombones blast, you know that Ford is feeling the full gamut of green-eyed emotions...
...Boito's text is more like a score--attentive to rhythm, and the ability of rhythm to characterize and to conjure atmosphere. Like Shakespeare he writes word music; he has a head start, of course, writing in Italian. His verse is eminently singable. Boito also pulls together the woolly Merry Wives plot, making it compact not to mention viable...