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Updated: May 2, 2025
Which Shows Why Librettists Pick at the Coverlet The trouble about musical comedy, and the reason why a great many otherwise kindly and broadminded persons lie in wait round the corner with sudden scowls, their whole being intent on beating it with a brick the moment it shows its head, is that, from outside, it looks too easy.
New York was full of librettists who would have done the work equally well for half the money, but, like most managers, Mr Goble had the mental processes of a sheep. "Follow the Girl" was the last outstanding musical success in New York theatrical history: Wally had written it: therefore nobody but Wally was capable of rewriting "The Rose of America."
In 1856 he made the acquaintance of Jules Barbier and Michel Carre, and asked them to collaborate with him in an opera. They assenting, he proposed Goethe's "Faust" as a subject, and it met with their approval. Together they went to see M. Carvalho, who was then director of the Theatre Lyrique. He, too, liked the idea of the opera, and the librettists went to work.
A generation also lies between them, and they ought to bear a relationship to each other something like that existing between "Le Nozze di Figaro" and "Il Barbiere di Siviglia." Indeed, the bond ought to be closer, for one man wrote books and music as well of the Grail dramas, whereas different librettists and different composers created the Figaro comedies.
As an experiment, they prepared a small work called "Dafne" for private presentation at the palace of the Corsi. Rinuccini was the first of a long and usually incompetent lineage of librettists. The music was written by Peri and Caccini.
He is mentioned in a theatrical manifesto of 1708 as being already "beloved and celebrated in Italy"; Barthold Feind, one of the Hamburg librettists, who in 1715 translated Handel's Rinaldo, called him "the incomparable Handel, the Orpheus of our time"; and from 1715 to 1734 almost all of Handel's London operas were represented on the Hamburg stage.
There could be no greater proof of his generosity of heart and his versatility of talent. In these days of bitter quarreling over the rights of authors in their works, it may be amusing to know that Victor Hugo contested the rights of Italian librettists to borrow their plots from French plays.
As Pantomime writers in the early days there were Thomas Dibdin, son of Charles Dibdin, the writer of nautical ballads, Pocock and Sheridan. Dibdin was one of the best of Pantomime librettists, and from the years 1771 to 1841 his prolific pen, as a writer of Pantomimes, was never idle, as from it came some thirty-three Pantomimes, and all successes.
He appears to have had little ambition, and was content throughout his career to fit his saccharine melodies to whatever words the librettists of the day chose to supply. No one can deny him the possession of fluent and commonplace melody, but there his claim to musicianship ends.
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