Word: librettist
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...trials, deals with the conscience of a community stirred to a storm of hatred and terror by the sexual fantasies of Abigail Williams, a wanton teen-age Pilgrim ("Come to me now," she sings, "as you came before, like some great stallion wildly pantin' "). Ward, expertly assisted by Librettist Bernard Stambler, retained the shape of the Miller play almost intact-and also much of the language...
...young Englishwoman who urges her penniless lover to start a flirtation with an ailing American heiress, hoping that the heiress, who is compared in the story to a dove, will soon die and leave him rich and free. In stripping the story to the operatic bone, Moore and Librettist Ethan Aver changed the name of the scheming suitor from Merton Densher to Miles Dunster (because, says Moore, ''the name Densher could not be enunciated today without a ribald response"), and they gave the opera an extra twist by making Densher announce, after the death of the heiress, that...
...even Mozart's idea. Conceived by a wealthy dilettante named Tobias Philipp von Gebler and scored by an obscure schoolmaster, the thing was such a botch that Gebler, taking a friend's advice, paid Mozart to write a new score. The composer did considerably better than the librettist. On Gebler's flimsy plot-the love of a young Pharaoh for a temple virgin-Mozart draped 22 minutes of delightful music that almost compensated for 81 minutes of unrelievedly boring talk. Nevertheless, Thames talked itself to death, closed shortly after its premiere in Vienna in 1774. In last...
Munich's other resurrection, Strauss's Der Friedenstag, also suffered from a weak book-as did all of Strauss's operas after the death of Librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Strauss had wanted Novelist Stefan Zweig as his librettist, but he was advised-i.e., ordered-by the Nazis to find a text writer of pure Aryan stock. His choice was Library Director Joseph Gregor, whose first draft was so hopeless ("Your dialogue between the two commanders is all wrong," wrote Strauss furiously; "it reads like two school teachers") that Zweig secretly rewrote the whole thing. Acclaiming...
Some of those who adore the early, sentiment-laden Puccini operas, have decided that Turandot is an "insincere" work. The super-heros are accused of inhuman conduct--which was precisely what Puccini had intended. (In one of his many letters to Giuseppe Adami, the librettist, Puccini had called Calaf and Turandot "almost super-human beings.") However, their inhuman conduct was to become humanized through Liu's example. Calaf's cruel desertion of Liu and Timur and Turandot's vicious behavior towards her subjects and suitors alike was not condoned by Puccini. During the final duet (the part he never completed...