Word: libretti
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...Offenbach problem is that though the music is at least as intoxicating now as it could have been ninety or a hundred years ago, most of the libretti (including the one for La Belle Helene by Meilhac and Halevy) appear to be not for all time but of an age. The most obvious solution to the problem would be a recording or concert performance in the original--and, to most of us, impenetrable--French. But the music is so gracefully opposite to its subject matter that something of precious value is lost when there is no palpable context...
...since to alter his verdict. Giraldo Cinthio's story of the Moor of Venice, his ensign Iago and his wife Desdemona has, in fact, been the source of several superlatives: it gave us Rossini's Otello, his finest serious opera; it gave us the best of all Italian opera libretti (by Arrigo Boito), which, when set to music by Verdi, became the supreme Italian tragic opera of the Romantic century; and it gave us Shakespeare's unequaled, Baroque-styled drama (as distinguished from his Renaissance plays like Romeo and Richard II, and from his Mannerist plays like Hamlet and Lear...
...Gilbert libretti were written exclusively for the stage, and no amount of editing could possibly adapt them successfully to the screen. J. Arthur Rank's attempt is almost bizzare. Its cast is a mixture of stage and screen actors, each group obliged to assume the function of the other, and neither succeeding very well...
...only private farm lands were seized. Near the much-bombed village of Monte Libretti, the Government owned a 2,000-hectare farm for breeding and training army mounts, and for the general improvement of horses in Latium. The farm caught the eye of Crispino Ottavi, Communist president of the Monte Libretti Labor Federation. Ottavi is a tall, immensely powerful man, with big boxer's arms. He wears outsize brown riding boots, checked breeches, U.S. Army sweaters. He has a sunburnt bull neck, small, calculating, brown eyes set in a network of humorous wrinkles. For Monte Libretti's poor...
...libretto of the opera, Carmen, has been regarded for a long time as one of the best. It is, indeed, coherent and dramatic, and far better than most operatic libretti, But it must be said that it cheapens in many places the magnificent story...