Word: librettos
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Adapt and translate the librettos into the language Joe speaks-English . . ." Billy complained that when the average European goes to the opera, he feels that he's going to the theater, "but when Joe Citizen in this country is shoehorned into a tuxedo, he feels that he's going to a concert. Joe isn't interested in the plot because he doesn't know what the plot is all about, and the stilted jabberwocky in the printed libretto only confuses him further...
...even Verdi finally fell before the power of Boito's poetry and his superb dramatic skill. Said Verdi, after completing Otello at 73: "If I were 30 years younger, I should like to begin a new opera tomorrow-on the condition that Boito provided the libretto." Boito did, and the result (with Shakespeare's help) was Falstaff, one of the greatest triumphs of both words & music of them...
...Still way is scratching out only a few bars a day in his modest Los Angeles home. His great enthusiasm is opera: he has written four, but none has ever been published. One of them, Troubled Island, with a libretto adapted from a play by Poet Langston Hughes, was rejected by the Metropolitan, says Still, because it called for an all-Negro cast. "They never heard of makeup, I guess...
...traditional curtain-raiser began the evening's activities. It is really just a short sketch expanded into a half-hour with music, a kind of parody of coincidence-filled drama, and a wonderful curtain line. Sir Arthur Sullivan was the composer, but the libretto was written by two gentlemen named Morton and Burnand. A few years later Sullivan entered into a much more successful partnership...
...Maid was originally written for the perishable market place of radio. It is a near-slapstick story of a small-town spinster who plays hostess to a hobo until he runs off with her maid and car. The libretto is a gag-writer's dream, filled with skillful swoons (by Marie Powers, star of The Medium), gay tunes, and amateur-theatrical hamming. The audience loved every minute of it, right down to the final clinch and the hero's preposterous curtain line-"Your mouth is an abyss...