Word: librettist
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...surely did not add to the necessarily exact timing between the orchestra, solo voices, and chorus. And despite the obvious virtues of understanding gained by using English words, no one interested in music will ever be reconciled to hearing the quick rhymes and smooth-flowing Italian diction of librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte exchanged for the ponderous, ungainly English of even so able translator as Edward Dent...
From a poem. by the Rev. George Crabbe, a 19th-Century English parson-poet, Librettist Montagu Slater had fashioned a psychopathic case history of a sadistic Suffolk fisherman. The first scene is an inquest into the murder of Peter Grimes's boy apprentice. Peter Grimes is exonerated, but the townspeople-fishermen, harlots and scowling drunks-still suspect him and set out to persecute him. Peter takes another apprentice to work for him, and the second boy dies in an accident. The villagers hold Peter responsible and drive him out to sea to drown himself. The score is Mozartian...
Diadems & Dunce Caps. Oscar Hammerstein II was almost mythically affluent, with a producer's or librettist's haul from five smash hits: Oklahoma!, Carousel...
Died. Leonard Liebling, 65, longtime editor of the influential Musical Courier, critic and composer, librettist of four comic operas, concert pianist; of heart disease; in Manhattan...
...humanity into his book-writing than most of his rivals. One reason may be that many of his librettos were discerningly adapted from fairly full-blooded material. Another likely reason: Hammerstein lacks the typical Tin Pan Alley taste and the blatantly Broadway mind. He is ruefully conscious that the librettist is the whipping boy of musicomedy, the first to be blamed for a failure, the last to get credit for a success. In musicomedy, however, the whipping boy's wages are a fair compensation. Hammerstein's current earnings are well over $300,000 a year...