Families would share
librettos and singers, and Reardon does not rule out collaboration between the families for productions mounted by the Rozzi in the final decade of the seventeenth century.
Anyone who can read English and has ears to hear would do better to listen to a CD whose liner note includes Morell's original libretto--not the
libretto printed in this volume, a late variant used by Handel in 1758, when he was no longer making his own arrangements of his works, and taken from the 1866 edition by Friedrich Chrysander, None of the authors seems to be aware of the good and cheap Novello edition (1998) by Merlin Channon, which explains Handel s progressive alterations and cites Morell's explanation for the story s compression; this matters when the issue--as in several essays here--is the dramatic structure and sense of the text.
For these reasons, the study of opera has often been delegated to musicologists who, for obvious reasons, tend to privilege the score over the
libretto.
The case of Argippo is quite different, for only three arias known from other Vivaldi operas appear in the text of the
libretto, which is today in the Prague National Library.
McClatchy, an old friend of Rorem's who wrote the
libretto for Our Town, disagrees.
They bound themselves to the rules and conventions of heroic classical drama inherited from Aristotle and expanded and itemized by the French dramatists Racine and the two Corneilles, whose works formed the basis of many of their
librettos. The tragedie lyrique of course was suspect.
Italian poet, satirist, and author of comic opera
librettos, chiefly remembered for the verse satires Poema tartaro (1787; "Tartar Poem") and Gli animali parlanti (1802, "The Talking Animals"; The Court and Parliament of Beasts).
Munzmay's comparative analysis of the
libretto with its source material sheds further light on the creative process of opera-comique
librettos and collaboratively authored works.
Luckily, the authors of the exhibition had an opportunity to study the
librettos of the opera kept in Lithuania in foreign libraries.
This volume, originally published in 1972, explores musical theater, focusing on
librettos. For each chapter, Kissel comments on the original author's (Engel) thoughts and adds some of his own that pertain to recent musicals.
In addition to his poetry, he penned a few pioneering plays (in verse!) with unapologetically gay characters and provided the
librettos for Virgil Thomson's Lord Byron and Charles Fussell's The Astronaut's Tale.
In that context, Dent's view (1913) of Cosi as the 'best of all Da Ponte's
librettos' seems almost deliberately perverse: certainly it was designed to be controversial, although it was typically perceptive.
French librettist and novelist who, in collaboration with Henri Meilhac, wrote the
librettos for most of the operettas of Jacques Offenbach.
She further outlines in general the state of sources for the operas--most of the primary sources are found in the Contarini Collection in the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice--as well as the editorial challenges faced due to the brevity of the musical notation (often on two staves, with a sparsely figured bass line, with some passages for strings), as well as the importance of various
librettos to the editorial process.
LaRue has based his study on the autographs, performing scores and printed
librettos (including source
librettos), which he has obviously studied with close attention, and he reports them accurately.
