Word: singspiel
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Seraglio predates The Impresario by four years and is written in the style of the Singspiel (literally, song-play), the popular 18th century German comic opera. These days it needs a clever stage style-or more expert clowning-to make a convincing evening. This, alas, the opera failed to get from Director Anthony Besch, who unaccountably kept the action stiff and stately...
...keep the action crackling along at a raucous, laugh-a-minute pace. The score is uniquely Orff-primitive rhythms and simple, rustic melodies, punctuated with fanfares and percussive outbursts. Orff, 69, Germany's most famed contemporary composer, believes that "melody and speech belong together," and in his Singspiel style he strives for a marriage in which neither dominates the other. Above all, his Wise Woman is what many operas are not-good theater...
Omnibus (NBC, 5-6 p.m.). "An Omnibus of American Songs," with Edie Adams, Myron McCormick and Robert Goulet leading the sociological singspiel...
Chronically poverty-stricken Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wanted to be married, decided to compose a light little Singspiel to pay the bills, titled it Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio). To make it popular, he set it in a harem. He filled it with "Turkish style" music and costumes which were fashionable in 18th Century Europe, gave the heroine his future wife's name Constanze. After the Vienna premiere in 1782, Emperor Joseph II said: "Too fine for our ears, my dear Mozart-and much too many notes." Despite the imperial reservation, Die Entf...
...basso, spoke and sang English with a Hungarian accent so thick he could not be understood. Most of the others went at Mozart's trifle like a man swinging at thistledown with a baseball bat. Somewhere along the line someone had forgotten that Mozart's little Singspiel was a lightweight musical comedy to be treated no more grandly than Broadway's Annie Get Your...
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