libretto

La Calisto, Cavalli's fifteenth opera, and the ninth to a libretto by Giovanni Faustini (1615-1651), premiered at the Teatro Sant'Apollinaire in Venice on 28 November 1651.

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.

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).

Everywhere, Littlejohn opposes popular excesses, such as Peter Sellar's stagings of Mozart, in which the "directorial conceit |is~ alien to the score," as well as academic excesses, such as Cornell University's "new opera studies," which treat librettos as autonomous works and subject them to advanced literary theory.

Luckily, the authors of the exhibition had an opportunity to study the librettos of the opera kept in Lithuania in foreign libraries.

The serious reader interested in further exploring Leoncavallo's work would also be interested in precise documentation of the location of autograph scores, librettos, and photographs; only the letters are consistently identified by archive.

This volume, originally published in 1972, explores musical theater, focusing on librettos.

2) - 'scioccherie di poeti' ('poets' nonsense'), Ferrando says - is well known, but there are also connections with Goldoni's Le pescatrici (1771) and Da Ponte's own librettos for Il finto cieco and Una cosa rata (both 1786), while Brown further sees the text as a response to the work of Da Ponte's arch-rival, Giambattista Casti (particularly II re Teodoro of 1784).

French librettist and novelist who, in collaboration with Henri Meilhac, wrote the librettos for most of the operettas of Jacques Offenbach.

By painstaking analysis of scribal hands, watermarks, rastrology, variants among the published librettos, names of performers written on extant parts, and archival payment records, Bartlet is able to outline the composition and performance history of the work in great detail.

Discrepancies between the autograph full score, the printed librettos (five editions on sale at performances before 1900) and the printed vocal scores are many and sometimes puzzling.