Word: librettists
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...last 36 years Coward has been getting impressive applause and profits in almost every other form of show business; he has been a successful playwright, stage & screen star, composer, director, producer, librettist, sometime song-&-dance man. Occasionally he has been a guest on U.S. radio shows. But the BBC normally pays only pittances to its performers, and Noel Coward, a commercial showman to his talented, tapered finger tips, works for no pittance...
...Britten's third opera in as many years had its premiere last week. It was Britten's first try at satirical comedy; his first two operas, Peter Grimes and The Rape of Lucretia (TIME, June 9), were both dark and tragic. For the new opera, Albert Herring, Librettist Eric Crozier did a slapstick adaptation of Guy de Maupassant's cynical Le Rosier de Mme. Husson, in which an innocent village bumpkin goes off on a wild, sinful night after being chosen King of the May. Britten scored it for chamber orchestra in his familiar brittle, witty...
...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...