Word: buffa
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...opera's interest stems from the emotional counterpoint between the longing for an unattainable past and a deep melancholy about the possibility of translating this past into the future. A similarly valedictory sense marks the humor of Gianni Schicchi, which responds to the tradition of opera buffa and becomes, in a sense, the terminus of this tradition...
This act is weaker than the first. Husovsky and Dawson perform their parts well if unremarkably, and Bubriski remains strong. The problem mostly lies in the transition from "opera buffa" to "verismo tragedy," as McNally has labelled it. That contrast contains the play's power, but it also puts a strain on its credibility. It is a difficult trick to plausibly turn a witty, realistic play about aging professionals' romantic entanglements into a violent and grand tragedy, no matter how many references to operatic emotion are strewn throughout. Despite the fine acting, the second act drags a little...
...forging ahead in their revision of the Mozart canon. As the Mozart bicentenary wheezed to a close, John Eliot Gardiner embarked on a project to record all of the operas; his first release, Idomeneo, has solidified Mozart's claims to mastery of opera seria as well as opera buffa...
Mercifully, Ghosts is not much about romantic drears, or even introspection. Corigliano set out to compose an opera buffa, an 18th century-style comic opera such as Figaro or Cosi Fan Tutte. As realized on the stage, scene after scene has a vivid, antic quality that somehow escapes being overly busy. Exploiting the vastness of the Met stage, designer John Conklin deploys props -- solid, handsome, witty -- in ever shifting assemblages. Director Colin Graham sends ghostly ladies flying gently through the air, each looking like a Fragonard dreamscape. Whatever their sins against the people, these aristocrats have found a happy repose...
...scripts. Gurney has been for the stage what Cheever was for fiction: the foremost chronicler of the foibles and angst of the Wasp upper middle class. The adaptation succeeded. But it also pointed up a significant difference between Cheever's striving suburbia and Gurney's blue- blood Buffa- lo: while many of Cheever's bedeviled characters are avidly accumulating, almost all of Gurney's etiolated aristocrats are watching the family fortune fade away...