Word: libretto
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Shakespeare's famous character is one of the main players in this year's opera, Otto Nicolai's The Merry Wives of Windsor which opened Wednesday night and will play through next weekend. The libretto is based on Shakepeare's play of the same name...
...first glance Nixon seems an unlikely subject, treated by an equally unlikely trio of Harvard graduates. Composer John Adams, 40, a minimalist of burgeoning popular appeal, had never written an opera before; Poet Alice Goodman, 29, had never written a libretto; and Director Peter Sellars, 30, was notorious for brassily upstaging the classics, setting Mozart's Don Giovanni in Spanish Harlem and Handel's Orlando partly on Mars...
Progressing from the impersonal panoply of statecraft to an almost hallucinatory intimacy of soulcraft, the libretto depicts Nixon as emotionally repressed and socially awkward but acutely aware of his role in history. Mostly written in couplets, the lyrics may sometimes be elliptical, but they are psychologically observant and very singable...
Because of its complexity and rarity, Revelation was the big attraction. Partch's own libretto alternates between two analogous fleshly rites: the orgiastic reception by female fans accorded to Dion (Obba Babatunde), a Presley symbol, and the lustful revels of the mythic Bacchae in praise of their priapic god, Dionysus. Each principal singer takes two roles. Mom (Suzanne Costallos) falls under the Pelvis' spell, just as her ancient Greek counterpart, Agave, is seduced by Dionysus. When Sonny (Christopher Durham) attempts to intervene, he is, in his alter ego of Pentheus, torn apart by the horde of crazed women...
...time the evening had ended, though, many were left wondering whether the production was anti-Nazi or anti-Semitic. Schoenberg's libretto makes an explicit extended centerpiece out of the episode of the Golden Calf: gold is collected and formed into an idol; a ritual slaughter of animals is followed by a sacrifice of Four Naked Virgins; there is an orgy of drunkenness, sexual license and suicide. By forsaking emotionally neutral biblical robes for specific ghetto mufti (only Moses, portrayed by Bass-Baritone Theo Adam, is outfitted in Old Testament garb), Ponnelle risked having the quarrelsome Jews appear like characters...