Word: librettist
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Mozart and Librettist Lorenzo da Ponte created an enormously alluring, vital protagonist who pursues his appetites with cheerful disregard for law or morality. After forcing himself on a noblewoman, Donna Anna, he duels with her father, the Commendatore, and kills him. Then, while the Don busies himself mostly with trying to seduce the peasant girl Zerlina, Donna Anna joins forces with her fiancé Don Ottavio and another of the Don's conquests, Donna Elvira, to hound him through a series of comic entanglements, disguises and escapes. When a statue of the slain Commendatore comes to life and challenges...
...ciel is one of the biggest climaxes in a score that sometimes seems to be nothing but climaxes. But Verdi and Librettist Arrigo Boito knew that after the massive choral scene in Act III, enough was enough. Hence the rightness of the subdued, wistfully melancholy fourth act, a sort of spacious postlude. This act is Desdemona's great moment. Soprano Gilda Cruz-Romo made the most of it, although in the earlier acts her singing had somewhat lacked color and shading. Poignant and dignified, she spun out the Willow Song and Desdemona's final prayer in long, crystalline...
...Librettist Mitchell, 46, is known as an anti-elitist who believes art should be "useful" to a broad public. Schat, 44, a political radical, was one of the collaborators on the 1969 Dutch opera Reconstruction, a political fantasia on Don Giovanni in which the Don represented imperialism and the Commendatore turned out to be Che Guevara. Thus it comes as no surprise that Houdini is suffused with a romantic-and at times sentimental-populism. In the final scene, Houdini appears from beyond the grave with the message that "there is no heaven but the people/ Let the people...
...Lulu is being given its first U.S. performances by the venturesome Santa Fe Opera. Some of the vocal panache and soaring emotion of the Paris production may be missing, but little else is. The Santa Feans have staged the work with unusual care and intelligence. This time Berg the librettist is as well served as Berg the composer...
...composer Dominick Argento, 51, who has at least two major successes, Postcard from Morocco and The Voyage of Edgar Allan Poe, to his credit. The new work, which had its premiere last week at the New York City Opera, is in almost every way a disappointment. Argento and his librettist, John Olon-Scrymgeour, say that their work is "after Dickens," not to be compared closely to Great Expectations...