Word: libretto
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...falls in love with a mulatto slave girl, and eventually makes a bold -but tragic-dash for freedom. Koanga's moods and moments range from a tender love scene to a fiery voodoo incantation. Everywhere, Delius' music flows effortlessly in and out, over and under the libretto (based on the novel The Grandissimes by George Washington Cable) with the caressing quality of rhapsody at its best. Save for a few instances of post-Wagnerian schmalz, the score is astonishingly original in its chromatic colorations and declamatory singing style...
...preceded it are something less than "the greatest story ever told." Perhaps that is why Webber and Rice, both of whom were brought up in the Anglican Church but eventually rejected it, have not worked too hard in Superstar to get the Christianity out of Christ. Despite Judas, both libretto and music are provocatively ambiguous about Christ's divinity. At The Crucifixion, the slow, chromatic climb of the orchestra is a compelling suggestion that Christ's spirit is ascending. The opera's last line is "Father, into your hands I commend my spirit...
...enjoy-or merely endure-Italian opera, especially Verdi, a word-for-word acquaintance with the libretto is not essential. Most listeners will be able to navigate the critical junctures of the average plot by developing a familiarity with a handful of catch phrases. Such verbal adornments keep the melodrama moving and can be used to tell almost any story. As in the following dialogue -drawn entirely from Verdi's Ernani -which took place between an opera-loving wife and a bored husband on opening night at the Met. SCENE...
...while delivering himself of 49 books. These included his five-volume industrial-age epic poem Paterson-along with 600-odd other poems, 52 short stories, four novels, four full-length plays and a brilliant, curiously neglected impression of American history (In the American Grain), not to mention an opera libretto and the translation of a medieval Spanish novel...
...stands Stephen Sondheim, composer and lyricist. Many recent Broadway scores have sounded as if they were composed by a Waring Blender. Sondheim is a man with an inventive musical mind; his lyrics have a spartan simplicity, yet they are witty, incisive and playful. Of George Furth, who wrote the libretto, one can only say: Hosanna, finally a book with intelligence. Producer-Director Harold Prince surpasses himself in staging this show and invests each scene with an electric tingle of surprise, delight and authority...