Word: librettist
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...grads of Harvard, both distinguished in the world of music, popped up with pooled talents as the creators of two new songs for their alma mater. Musicomedy Librettist Alan Jay (My Fair Lady) Lerner ('40) and Master-of-Most-Musical-Trades Leonard Bernstein ('39) had cooked up a lugubrious ("Harvard! Harvard! Onward go . . .") Dedication and a satirical, possibly soulful, ditty titled The Lonely Men of Harvard. Excerpt from the latter...
...LIBERTINE LIBRETTIST (292 pp.)-April FitzLyon - Abelard-Schuman...
...framework for his music." One possible explanation is that a better poet than Da Ponte might have been less willing to bow to Mozart's stern dictum: "In an opera the poetry must be altogether the obedient daughter of the music." It is the usual fate of the librettist to be forgotten in favor of the composer, but Da Ponte deserves to be remembered-not only because of his skillful service to Mozart, but because of the outrageous and fascinating life...
...step from presenting Gilbert and Sullivan to presenting opera is a difficult and admirable one, and the Student Fellowship at the local Congregational Church deserves full credit for a generally successful production of A Tree on the Plains. For the folk opera, librettist Paul Horgan has fashioned a somewhat naive but effective story about farmers in the American Southwest, and the music by Ernst Bacon is simple, combining hymntunes, folk and popular styles into a pleasant conglomeration...
Third item in this batch of operatic rarities: Arrigo Boïto's Mefistofele, newly recorded by RCA Victor on 2 LPs (with Boris Christoff, Giacinto Prandelli, Orietta Moscucci; Orchestra and Chorus of the Rome Opera conducted by Vittorio Gui). Known chiefly as a poet and mighty librettist (Verdi's Otello and Falstaff), Boïto always remained an interesting oddity as a composer; he premiered his version of Goethe's Faust at La Scala in 1868 only to see it booed off the stage after two performances because of its experimentation with Wagnerian techniques. Intellectually more...