Word: librettist
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...realistic idol in one scene, a starkly abstract grillwork in another. Although it took in a record $91,482 at the box office, the Met's new Nabucco was not likely to join vintage Verdi in the regular repertory. One reason was suggested by Arrigo Boito, the great librettist of Verdi's old age. The music would never be as powerfully appealing, Boito felt, to audiences not bred on Italian soil and breathing Italian...
...having just completed a $12 million civic center for the performing arts, was willing to offer a sizable (exact amount undisclosed) slice of Cana dian bacon to get the right show for the center's dedication. Camelot, the 1960 reunion of My Fair Lady's family (Librettist Alan Jay Lerner, Composer Frederick Loewe, Director Moss Hart, Star Julie Andrews), was the obvious choice...
Seventeen years and eight Broadway musicals after their first herculean hit (Oklahoma!). Composer Richard Rodgers, 58, abandoning memorable music for heartfelt words in the New York Times Magazine, saluted his friend and partner, Librettist Oscar Hammerstein II, on the eve of Hammerstein's 68th birthday this week. Their mutual affection is largely unspoken: "Oscar is fond of me-very fond, I think-as a man, and yet he has never even hinted vaguely at this. On the other hand, he's gone before the entire country on television and told everybody what a great person...
...faced a prickly problem: how to remain faithful to the original and yet cut the play by roughly one half. Last week, at England's Aldeburgh Festival, Britten's eagerly awaited Dream was greeted with salvos of critical applause. The composer, with the aid of Singer-Librettist Peter Pears, had solved his problem so brilliantly, reported a TIME correspondent, that "it becomes hard to imagine hearing the words again merely spoken without feeling a sense of loss...
...realized," said Richard Strauss of the Meisterwerk of his middle age, "that the opera would never have much success." He was speaking of Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman Without a Shadow), the huge complex of mythology and symbolism that he constructed with Librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal during World War I. Strauss guessed correctly: since its premiere in Vienna in 1919, the work has rarely been staged in Europe and never in the U.S. Last week Die Frau finally appeared on a U.S. stage in a San Francisco Opera production that made cheering audiences wonder where she had been...