Word: offenbach
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Lohengrin's. These similarities would not much matter if the music had independent life. Instead, the score is a shameless pastiche, something that Erich Korngold, the peerless artificer of movie music, would have deeply appreciated. Wagner (including an outright steal of Tristan's theme for Roland), Meyerbeer, Offenbach, all emerge from the pit. The vocal music is lifted mostly from Berlioz, who wrote wonderfully sensuous love duets. The pity is that in Manon, Massenet created an ineffable erotic style...
...pounding minister in Carlisle Floyd's Susannah, was based on those early experiences. Treigle's gaunt face and spidery figure virtually typecast him for such roles as Mephistopheles in Boito's and Gounod's versions of the Faust legend, and as the four villains in Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann...
...exercising a native's prerogative. She criticized the city's flamboyant new $148.5 million opera house that perches on the harbor like a multiwinged gull. "I can see it's too small," said 5 ft. 10 in. Joan before she made her operatic debut there in Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann. "The designer is even making my costumes smaller so the scale is right." Then she added, "What you need now is an opera house." She grew more conciliatory later, after an audience of 1,547 acclaimed La Stupenda rapturously at the opera...
...Beatles. With innovative ballet subjects like these, Britain's Peter Darrell has become known over the past decade as a choreographer who was going to be up with the times at all costs. His latest ballet is a full-length Tales of Hoffmann based on the Offenbach opera. Introduced last week at Manhattan's Lincoln Center by the American Ballet Theater, it is a shocker of another sort: an oldfashioned, behind-the-times entertainment that will offend no one, please some of the public, and bore serious balletomanes to distraction...
...music is inventive and full of deft characterizing touches. There is no reason the storied fancies of E.T.A. Hoffmann cannot work as ballet too-as long since proved by Coppelia and The Nutcracker. This Hoffmann has a recomposed score by John Lanchbery that draws also on other colorful Offenbach works. But its choreographic steps and gestures are trite, even humdrum at points, and devoid of the kind of grand line that grand ballet at its best demands. (Ah, those outstretched arms signaling the courtesan's entrance-as in a silent film starring Theda Bara...