Word: librettist
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...reformers" who are determined to abolish the exaggerated trills and cadenzas of the Italian stage. Writes Britain's Charles Burney, author of the erudite new General history of Music: "The chevalier Gluck is simplifying music . . . He tries all he can to keep his music chaste." Retorts popular Librettist Pietro Metastasio: Gluck is a composer of "surprising fire...
...true office of serving poetry by means of expression and by following the situations of the story, without interrupting the action or stifling it with a useless superfluity of ornaments." Although Italian prima donnas pay little attention to their words, Gluck heaped praises on the "heartfelt language" of his librettist, Ranieri Calzabigi, who also collaborated on Gluck's first big success, Orfeo ed Euridice...
...Librettist Calzabigi, he has provided a text for a youth who once was one of Austria's most promising child prodigies, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Their work, La Finta Giardiniera, was staged in Munich last year, and Mozart hopes to find sponsors for further productions. Mozart has been performing publicly on the harpsichord and violin since the age of six, but his remarkable gift seems to be turning mainly toward composition. Still only 20, he has already written ten Masses for his employer, the Archbishop of Salzburg, as well as a prodigious total of seven other operas, 18 violin sonatas...
...found lying on a street in Baltimore, near delirium, dying. In his last contact with friends, in Richmond, he had said he planned to take a boat to Baltimore. No record of the sailing was ever found. Argento and Librettist Charles M. Nolte have used that mysterious boat ride to construct a metaphoric voyage of selfdiscovery: Poe, the crazed poet, relives his loves, sins and miseries...
...hour chamber opera was composed in 1944 inside Theresienstadt, a "model" camp. The piece was in rehearsal but was banned after a similarity between the Emperor and the Führer was detected. Composer Viktor Ullmann, prolific in prewar Vienna, and Librettist Peter Kien, a young painter and poet, were later sent to Auschwitz, where they died. Their manuscript was rediscovered in London three years ago by British Conductor Kerry Woodward, who presented it with The Netherlands Opera Company in Amsterdam...