Word: libretto
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...indulgent aristocrat. There's nothing wrong with coloring the opera this way, but Raimondi and Losey paint over and obliterate the other half of Don Giovanni's character, the youthful embodiment of unbounded energy who mesmerized the romantics. They do Mozart and Da Ponte an injustice by simplifying the libretto's psychological tangle to a black-and-white social dialetic. Figaro would have better served such an intent...
Those subtitles give this Don Giovanni a great advantage over live opera, but pose a danger as well. By offering an instant, easily consulted libretto, they restore to the recitative sections the cynical bite normally lost on English-speaking audiences. Future directors. though, would do well to find themselves better translators than Losey's. As the spirits of hell clamor for the Don's soul, for example, he shouts, "They agitate my viscera...
...Most of the music is lip-synched to a prerecorded track; inside or out, wind or rain, we hear the souped-up ambience of the recording studio. The result is that characters who ought to be interacting lose touch with each other and finally with the sense of the libretto. The most absurd example is II mio tesoro intanto, in which Ottavio, supposedly at night, exhorts his friends to console Donna Anna while he goes in search of the authorities. Losey sends him strolling up and down a sunlit lawn, singing to nobody in particular, while pausing occasionally to nudge...
...than his finest work. Reprinted in Uncollected Stories, these early versions inspire a sense of deja vu, for Faulkner frequently expanded and reshaped his published stories and inserted them in novels. A tale of his called The Bear appeared in the Post in 1942, but it reads like a libretto to the famous novella of the same name that he included in Go Down, Moses later that year...
Even his powerful reorchestration of Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov was meant to dramatize the opera's message that an "antipeople government" is "inevitably" a criminal government. The composer believes that the score makes the point even more clearly than the Alexander Pushkin play on which the libretto is based. "For me, the abstract art-music-is more effective," he says...