Word: libretto
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...irresistible to the spectator as it was to the men on stage. But why such an enchantress would fall for Bradley Greenwald’s lackluster Don José remains a mystery. Greenwald carried himself with a stiffness that impeded his ability to bring passion to the libretto. Lyrics like “You only had to appear / Only to toss a glance towards me / In order to take hold of all my being” beg for fervor; Greenwald’s delivery was disappointingly lukewarm. Lacking romanticism, Greenwald’s Don José still might have made...
...Truth Is as Beautiful as Fiction Most writers are happy to achieve success in a single format, but such a career would bore gifted polymath Vikram Seth. The Indian-born author has already delighted readers with poetry, translations of Chinese verse, a book of travels through Tibet, a libretto and the monumental novel A Suitable Boy. This fall, Seth releases his latest foray into a new genre: a memoir titled Two Lives, which tells the true story of how his Indian granduncle Shanti fell in love with and married a Jewish-German woman after World War II. The book will...
...with The Golden Gate, a novel in verse set in California. His 1993 Indian saga A Suitable Boy - at nearly 1,400 pages the longest work of fiction in English since the 18th century - sold a million copies in Britain alone. Then came some poems, an opera libretto and ? nothing. "You don't know exactly what to write about next," Seth's mother, visiting from India, told him in 1994. "Why don't you write about him?" She was referring to another Seth family member who, improbably, has become the co-subject of one of the most remarkable biographies since...
...clashing rhythms and timbres as all the major characters sing simultaneously and Prospero exults, "My high charms work!/ and these, mine enemies, are all knit up/ in their distractions. They are in my power." What Eaton has done is not merely to set Porter's concise, three-act libretto, but to retell it in musical terms, creating a cognate of Shakespeare's play. It is a formidable intellectual as well as musical accomplishment...
Henze's The English Cat was first performed in Germany in 1983 and is now presented in America in English. Henze, one of the leading contemporary opera composers, has suppressed his penchant for blatant politicization to produce a subtle, cautionary fable. Bond's libretto tells the story of a pacifist band of petit bourgeois cats who have formed the Royal Society for the Protection of Rats and have been rearing a young orphan mouse. The plot concerns the ill-starred triangle of Tom (Baritone Scott Reeve), Minette (Soprano Inga Nielsen) and her husband Lord Puff (Tenor Michael Myers). Seeing...