Word: librettists
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...librettist, Menotti sets the scene in New York's Little Italy, and superimposes the sometimes gay, sometimes squalid American lives of its citizens on their Old World traditions. This time, the conflict between faith and reason is personified by Annina, the young and sickly "saint" who has visions of the Crucifixion and shows the holy stigmata on Good Fridays, and her rebellious brother Michele, who thinks religion is fanaticism. Annina yearns to become a nun, but Michele thinks her visions are delusions and tries to prevent her from taking the veil...
...Librettist Joe Darion fairly faithfully followed the saga of archy, described by his creator, the late Columnist Don Marquis, as a sensitive cockroach who had to express himself or die. For archy, writing was even more painful than for most poets: he had to type each letter by diving headfirst from the frame of the machine to the keys (his works were all in lower case because he was unable to land simultaneously on the shift key). His bruised outpourings are mostly about mehitabel, the life-battered but life-loving cat ("toujours gai, toujours gai") who is pretty sure...
Composer Liebermann got his idea from a news clipping he read two years ago. Blending it with Homer's Odyssey, Librettist Heinrich Strobel wove a modern story about a war widow (Penelope) who remarries, then hears that her husband (Ulysses) is still alive and about to return. When she goes to meet him at the station, she finds he has died on the way; and when she goes back home to her second husband, she finds that he has committed suicide in the meantime to save her from an impossible dilemma...
...their "development of a fresh theatrical form, the musical play" (e.g., Oklahoma!, South Pacific), Composer Richard Rodgers and Librettist Oscar Hammerstein II received doctorates (of humane letters) from the University of Massachusetts. Next day Drs. Rodgers and Hammerstein did education a good turn, endowed Manhattan's famed Juilliard School of Music with a perpetual scholarship to go yearly to a promising young singer...
...raised in Peoria), but always knew he wanted to write an "American" opera. A dozen years ago, he read Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a prose poem about the hardscrabble South by James Agee, with photographs by Walker Evans. Copland found it inspiring, afterward showed it to his librettist, Poet Horace Everett,* who was struck by the photographs of serefaced farmers and their families. Everett transferred the setting from the South to Kansas and finished the libretto two years...