Word: libretto
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...love duet, and plenty of Hungarian themes, both martial and melancholy. Another plus: Designer Rolf Gérard's brilliant costumes and sets, particularly a Viennese throne room almost handsome enough to bring back the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Heavily on the minus side are a preposterous libretto, not aided by Translator Maurice Valency's English lyrics, and Cyril Ritchard's uncertain direction...
...Sound of Music-with Richard Rodgers supplying the music, Oscar Hammerstein the lyrics, Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse the libretto, and with Mary Martin as the star-provides "What's in a name?" with at least one answer: "A $2,325,000 advance sale.'' The show itself, in accordance with Rodgers and Hammerstein's desire not to repeat themselves, goes to Austria at the time of the Anschluss for its story, to the famous Trapp Family Singers, who dramatically escaped from the Nazis' clutches. Besides Captain Georg von Trapp, there were his seven children...
Audiences have generally been disturbed by the sordidness of Jenufa's libretto (it hinges on the drowning of an illegitimate child), by the opera's harshly dissonant score, and its generally unmelodic vocal line. Composer Janacek derived many of his melodies from the inflections of common speech, caught them by prowling around with a notebook, jotting down overheard phrases and sentences in approximate musical notation. The result is that the orchestra becomes part of the drama. In last week's performance (which marked the U.S. debut of opulent-voiced Dutch Soprano Gré Brouwenstijn) Jenufa proved...
...since Hollywood Lyricist Howard Dietz wrote a new English libretto for La Boheme six years ago (Love, rhymed Dietz, "is a feast for a Roman/ It's warming my abdomen") had a Metropolitan Opera production created such a fuss. "Among the finest productions in Bing's regime," wrote Miles Kastendiek in the New York Journal-American. "Non-Mozartean shenanigans," snorted Howard Taubman in the Times, while the Herald Tribune's Paul Henry Lang denounced it as "a travesty." Occasion: a new production, staged by Broadway's Cyril Ritchard, of Mozart's comic masterpiece, The Marriage...
...that Mozart, whose sense of humor was bawdy and mercurial, saw in Figaro anything but superb entertainment. Director Ritchard feels that even a Mozart opera should be theater, not merely oratorio, based his interpretation on a study of the original Beaumarchais play from which Lorenzo da Ponte wrote the libretto; Figaro, he thinks, is shot through with a kind of "Hogarthian exaggeration" too often muted by Mozart worshipers...