Word: meilhac
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Nord, the drama has more power than it possibly could in a 3,000-seat opera house. Brook has chosen his singers as much for their acting skills as for their voices. By tightening the plot he creates dramatic situations beyond anything envisioned by Bizet's librettists (Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy) or even by Mérim&233;e. In this version, Carmen and Micaela, Don José's girlfriend from back home, are direct rivals and have a real fight when Carmen carves a bloody cross on Micaela's forehead...
...Offenbach problem is that though the music is at least as intoxicating now as it could have been ninety or a hundred years ago, most of the libretti (including the one for La Belle Helene by Meilhac and Halevy) appear to be not for all time but of an age. The most obvious solution to the problem would be a recording or concert performance in the original--and, to most of us, impenetrable--French. But the music is so gracefully opposite to its subject matter that something of precious value is lost when there is no palpable context...
...Year's Eve attraction. The score is second-rate Offenbach, first performed in 1868, well after the glories of La Belle Helens (1864) and Orpheus (1858); but it is still the work of a master in his field. The libretto is by two hacks of genius, Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy, who vaguely based it (as they did their celebrated book for Carmen) on a work by Prosper Mérimée.* As a pretty street singer who ditches her poor but honest boy friend (Baritone Theodor Uppman) for a viceroy of Peru, Soprano Patrice Munsel...
...first. It was originally a French play called Le Réveillon (The Awakening), written by sometime Offenbach librettists Henry Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy in 1872, and based on a Berlin comedy of 1851. Strauss set a German adaptation to music two years later. Since then, it has been called, in various productions, A Wonderful Night, Fly-by-Night, The Merry Countess, Champagne Sec, etc., and, in the latest Broadway version (TIME, Nov. 9, 1942), Rosalinda...
...great theatrical and musical troupes of the world. Puffed to the limit and beloved by "Barnum" Gest, it has pardonably fallen just a trifle short of expectations. The production of La Perichole, with the Offenbach score and with what amounted to an entire re-writing of the Meilhac-Halevy libretto by Director Dantchenko himself, proved to be an unadulterated source of enjoyment to all except strict operatic purists. The setting, which depicted a market place in ancient Lima, Peru, was in the best Russian tradition of a colorful and decorative, essentially two-dimensioned background. And against it the elaborate perfection...