Word: librettist
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Thirty-five years ago German Composer Richard Strauss and his librettist, Dramatist Hugo von Hofmannsthal, went back to Greek drama for a subject. The result, Elektra, is the most hair-raising of modern operas...
Composer Strauss and his librettist laid their scene in a Hellenic back yard, envisioned livestock rooting about the grave of ax-murdered Agamemnon while his murderers' dying screeches float from backstage over the most malignant of operatic orchestrations. Their frenzied, hagridden Elektra, daughter of the slain Agamemnon and instigator of the ghastly revenge that overtakes his killers, demanded a singer of enormous endurance. Mariette Mazarin, who introduced the part to the U. S. in 1910, fainted while taking her final curtain calls. The late Ernestine Schumann-Heink, powerful Katrinka of opera singers, left the original cast at Dresden because...
...never achieved by her illustrious great grandfather Edgar Allan Poe.* When penniless Miss Wells consumes three orders of spaghetti in a Broadway restaurant, the proprietor and his violinist (Rubinoff) let her sing for her supper. That is enough to convince Diner George Macrae (Don Ameche), a successful musical comedy librettist, that Judith is wasting her time as a playwright. Although this impression is confirmed when Macrae and Producer Sam Gordon (Charles Winninger) read her dismal drama, North Winds, in which the principal characters all freeze to death, they take an option on it as a means of persuading Judith...
Married. Howard Dietz, 40, advertising & publicity director for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, librettist (Three's a Crowd, Flying Colors); and Mrs. Tanis Guinness Montagu, 28, heiress to an Irish brewing fortune ("Guinness Is Good For You"), who two months ago jilted the Earl of Carnarvon; at Juarez, Mexico. Both were previously divorced...
Died. Harry Bache Smith, 75, librettist of more than 300 comic operas and musicomedies, lyricist of 6,000 songs; of heart disease; in Atlantic City. His most profitable work was Robin Hood (1890) with Reginald de Koven. His share of the royalties totaled $250,000 by 1912, and such numbers as 0 Promise Me and Brown October Ale kept him in the highest bracket of the American Society of Composers, Authors " Publishers until his death. Other Smith productions: Victor Herbert's The Fortune Tetter, The Serenade, The Idol's Eye, Irving Berlin's Watch Your Step, Stop...