Word: librettists
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...sing. Said Baritone Frank Rogier, who sang the role of Seducer Tarquinius: "Any time you sound in tune with the orchestra, you're off. So you go in the other direction." But Britten's insistent, subtle use of rhythmic and dissonant backgrounds put a wallop into Librettist Ronald Duncan's seething play. The opera opens with a rousing drinking and singing bout in the tent of Roman Generals Junius and Collatinus, with Tarquinius, the Etruscan prince who "treats the proud city [Rome] as if it were his whore." It closes with an anticlimactic epilogue after Lucretia...
Strumpet Call. As producer as well as librettist of the famous operas, Gilbert was the driving power behind the scenes. Through him, the light-opera chorus ceased to be a mere massed accompaniment to the soloists, became vociferous participants in the speedy, highly involved counterpoint of Gilbertian song. Through him, too, many a D'Oyly Carte Company member rose from the ranks to stardom. It was rarely a smooth rise: Gilbert's temper was as full of spikes as a bag of nails, his rehearsals long and terrifying. Once, when a player warmly urged his untalented mistress...
...Mozart fans who expected another Don Giovanni or Marriage of Figaro, it was a disappointment. The Abduction from the Seraglio is a trifle in which half of the dialogue is spoken, not sung. Its story (supplied by Librettist Gottlieb Stephanie, who borrowed it from a comedy by Dramatist Christoph Bretzner, who probably borrowed it from an English comic opera called The Captive) tells of an English cavalier and his manservant who try to liberate the cavalier's lady love and her maid from a Turkish pasha's harem...
...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...