Word: librettos
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...HUMAN COMEDY Music by Gait MacDermot Libretto by William Dumaresq
Produced in the Paris Opéra's sumptuous Palais Gamier, Messiaen's work, to the composer's own libretto, is on the grandest scale. It lasts five hours and 40 minutes and requires a large chorus and 120-piece orchestra, including extra brass and winds, a large percussion battery and three electronic keyboard instruments called Ondes Martenot. The orchestra is so big that it overflows the pit to envelop both sides of the stage and several boxes. The subject is the spiritual transformation of Francis the man into Francis the saint. "I have chosen Francis," says...
...first major production he designed was the 1975 Glyndebourne version of Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress, its libretto by W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman. Hockney, never embarrassed about paying homage to his aesthetic hearth gods, did the whole thing in the manner of Hogarth's engravings of that moral phantasmagoria set in 18th century England, stylizing the sets into crosshatched black-and-white etchings. Their graphic wit and punch reached a memorable climax in the final scene, where poor Tom Rakewell, insane at last, finds himself in Bedlam. The wall is covered with graffiti, each...
Bizet: If Brook and his screenwriter-playwright collaborator, Jean-Claude Carrière, were to present me with this libretto now, yes, I might be intrigued. But I worked within quite different terms, the opéra-comique's of 1875 and my own. Which brings us to the fundamental point that Brook has missed...
Bizet: In a good opera, the drama, the psychology, the structure all reside in the music far more than in the libretto. If you rearrange the libretto, you cannot simply drape remnants of the score over the new framework. Since we are quoting Nietzsche, remember that he said my score "builds, organizes, finishes," and by heaven it does...