Word: librettist
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...realized," said Richard Strauss of the Meisterwerk of his middle age, "that the opera would never have much success." He was speaking of Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman Without a Shadow), the huge complex of mythology and symbolism that he constructed with Librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal during World War I. Strauss guessed correctly: since its premiere in Vienna in 1919, the work has rarely been staged in Europe and never in the U.S. Last week Die Frau finally appeared on a U.S. stage in a San Francisco Opera production that made cheering audiences wonder where she had been...
...Moss Hart, "like begging in India, is an honorable but humbling profession." On the face of it, Playwright Hart has little to be humble about. As co-author of such comedy classics as The Man Who Came to Dinner and You Can't Take It with You, as librettist of Lady in the Dark and director of My Fair Lady, he will hold top billing in the American popular theater for a long time to come. But he has not had a play of his own on Broadway since the earnest, charming Climate of Eden in 1952. (There were...
Richard Strauss completed his last opera, Capriccio, in 1941. but the world that he and co-Librettist Clemens Kraus invoked in their "conversation piece for music" was as remote in spirit from the chaos of a Bremen or a Mannheim as Strauss's Bavarian mountain retreat was from the final convulsions of the Third Reich. The subject is opera itself-the relative merits of words and music-and it might just as aptly have been summed up under the title Six Characters in Search of an Opera. In a rococo salon near Paris, the six main figures sit chatting...
...prefiguring the emotional insights of Otello, but it is also marred by trivia, such as a kind of witches' cancan in the first scene. The libretto (by Verdi, put into verse by Francesco Piave) dimly reflects some of the original's greatness, but it is far behind Librettist Arrigo Boito's Otello and Falstaff, and is essentially a choppy, ill-balanced synopsis. The Met's production, while brilliant in most respects, was faulted by some ludicrous details and a kind of Teutonic touch that is alien both to Verdi's Italian music and to Shakespeare...
...Maria Callas, Zinka Milanov, and Rudolph Bing together in one room and you'll have the situation that forms the basis for Mozart's charming little comic opera, The Impresario. The petty jealousies and bickerings detailed by Mozart and his librettist strike home today just as well as they...