Word: librettist
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When Elektra had its premiere in Dresden in 1909, it nearly shocked the critics out of their seats. For the better part of two hours, Strauss's orchestra rages, shrieks and howls with a kind of demented fury. Moreover, Librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal's reading of Sophocles bristles with frank Freudian overtones of a kind the operatic stage had not seen before and would not see again until Berg's Wozzeck. All in all, the audience tended to agree with the fabled Ernestine Schumann-Heink, who sang the first Klytaemnestra but vowed never to do it again...
Gioconda's absurd libretto (by "Tobio Gorria," anagram for Arrigo Boito, Verdi's great librettist) revolves about a love plot of pentagonal complexity; Barnaba is in love with Gioconda, who is in love with Enzo, who is in love with Laura, who is married to Alvise. By the time Gorria-Boito sets things right, four acts and nearly that number of hours have elapsed. But La Gioconda is a singers' opera, and it gives the principals some rousing tunes, including Enzo's great second-act aria, Cielo e mar, superbly rendered last week by Tenor Tucker...
...rippled at the piano while a companion paced and hummed. This was not Lerner and Loewe at work, but Loewe enjoying himself and TIME Senior Editor Henry Grunwald mixing work with some nostalgia. The Loewe-Grunwald repertoire: songs from Countess-Maritza and The Smiling Husband by the late Austrian Librettist, Alfred Grunwald, whom Composer Loewe knew back in Vienna more than 30 years ago, and who was Editor Grunwald's father. To his astonishment, Grunwald found that Loewe remembered more of his father's songs than...
...train are eight baggage cars full of scenery, more than 200 people, including 46 stagehands, 41 musicians and 56 actors. Above all, he comes with a pair of gifted squires, Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, now the best writer-composer team in the American musical theater. Lerner, the librettist, and Loewe, the composer, have already proved themselves worthy of the King. Their last try was My Fair Lady. They also did Brigadoon, Paint Your Wagon, and the much-Oscared film Gigi. They have now written and are still rewriting on the road Camelot, probably the biggest, most beautifully...
...Collaborators. No excess of wives, girl friends, possessions or noise has ever seriously interfered with L. & L.'s work. The composer-librettist relationship can produce some extraordinary cases of love-hate, as in the case of Gilbert and Sullivan. Professionally, Lerner and Loewe are marvelously meshed, and Fritz even goes so far as to say of Alan, "I love him." But friendship is not really necessary for artistic partnership or for marriage...