Word: librettist
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...been as instantly controversial as The Death of ! Klinghoffer. To begin with, the subject matter is politically incendiary: the brutal 1985 murder of a wheelchair-using American Jew by Palestinian terrorists aboard the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro. Further, the opera is the second collaboration by composer John Adams, librettist Alice Goodman, choreographer Mark Morris and director Peter Sellars -- the people behind Nixon in China. That dazzling 1987 opera left a trail of argument in its wake as it made its way across America and Europe. Surely, Klinghoffer would be even more provocative than its predecessor. Wouldn...
Senior writer George J. Church's second greatest talent is penning musical parodies. Colleagues celebrating milestones in their lives are frequently blessed with a Church ditty, sung by the renowned librettist himself to one of a long list of pop tunes (e.g., I Left My Heart in San Francisco). His third greatest talent, say some, is his unique taste in clothes, which runs to purple ties and gold blazers. But the first thing we all know about George is that he is one of the most prolific and lucid writers ever to grace our pages...
...year, and Yo-Yo Ma and Emanuel Ax will tour four cities with his cello-and-piano sonata in May. Casino Paradise (an opera about a gangster "that's more or less like a musical") premieres in Philadelphia in April. Other coming works: a "baby opera" about Mozart's librettist Lorenzo da Ponte; a song cycle of poems by American women for Marilyn Horne; and a clarinet concerto for Stanley Drucker and the New York Philharmonic...
...sheet and beckoning for comfort, on the detective's flophouse bed; the sultry wife of a rich, infirm old man, who fibs as automatically as other people breathe; the detective's torch-singer ex-girlfriend, now reduced to offering more private entertainments; and a spooky guru bilking the faithful. Librettist Larry Gelbart cheerily exploits these cliches without sneering at the genre. In telling the Hollywood side of the story, however, he is at times as snide as in his just closed satire of Iran-contra, Mastergate. But when he becomes cranky about the writer's woeful lot, the show...
...Stuffed into a hamper of dirty laundry to escape a jealous husband, the portly knight gets ignominiously flung into the Thames. "Oh, oh, oh," he finally cries as the supposedly merry wives of Windsor burn him with their tapers. In setting this black comedy to music, Verdi and his librettist, Arrigo Boito, degrade the hero still further. "Lord, make him impotent," the women chorus as everyone flails and pummels the fallen hero. And yet after his punishment on the stage of the Brooklyn Academy of Music last week, a wonderful thing happened. Falstaff mysteriously rose above his tormentors and soared...