Word: librettists
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Unhappily, so does the librettist, who has chosen to write in verse: "Even though Tom may be gone His memory I'll keep; I'm sure that we can carry on With income from our sheep." So does Director Jack (Lucky Me) Donohue, who can't even extort amusing pedal persiflage from Actor Bolger, one of the cleverest comic dancers of the age. And so do Lyricist Mel Leven and Songwriter George Bruns, who might profitably have excised Glenn MacDonough's words ("Toyland! Toyland! Little girl and boyland!") but should have restricted the impulse to "modernize...
Vassar College commissioned the composer and librettist, both members of its faculty, to create Command Performance to celebrate the college's hundredth anniversary. Command Performance is, as intended, "a new musical and dramatic work of major proportions," replete with operatic poses. Its singers deliver love duets into empty space. Its music appeals and its ending is happy. As a dramatic production it never bogs down. It is smooth and polished, though hardly profound...
...trials, deals with the conscience of a community stirred to a storm of hatred and terror by the sexual fantasies of Abigail Williams, a wanton teen-age Pilgrim ("Come to me now," she sings, "as you came before, like some great stallion wildly pantin' "). Ward, expertly assisted by Librettist Bernard Stambler, retained the shape of the Miller play almost intact-and also much of the language...
...young Englishwoman who urges her penniless lover to start a flirtation with an ailing American heiress, hoping that the heiress, who is compared in the story to a dove, will soon die and leave him rich and free. In stripping the story to the operatic bone, Moore and Librettist Ethan Aver changed the name of the scheming suitor from Merton Densher to Miles Dunster (because, says Moore, ''the name Densher could not be enunciated today without a ribald response"), and they gave the opera an extra twist by making Densher announce, after the death of the heiress, that...
Munich's other resurrection, Strauss's Der Friedenstag, also suffered from a weak book-as did all of Strauss's operas after the death of Librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Strauss had wanted Novelist Stefan Zweig as his librettist, but he was advised-i.e., ordered-by the Nazis to find a text writer of pure Aryan stock. His choice was Library Director Joseph Gregor, whose first draft was so hopeless ("Your dialogue between the two commanders is all wrong," wrote Strauss furiously; "it reads like two school teachers") that Zweig secretly rewrote the whole thing. Acclaiming...