[ noun ] the words of an opera or musical play <noun.communication>
Libretto \Li*bret"to\ (l[i^]*br[e^]t"t[-o]; It. l[-e]*br[asl]t"t[-o]), n.; pl. E. {Librettos} (-t[=o]z), It. {Libretti} (-t[-e]). [It., dim. of libro book, L. liber. See {Libel}.] (Mus.) (a) A book containing the words of an opera or extended piece of music. (b) The words themselves.
Graun's "Montezuma," with a libretto by Frederick the Great, is even more of an oddity.
Gaetano Rossi based the libretto on a tragedy by Voltaire. Semiramide, queen of Babylon, had a prince (Ramey) kill her husband 15 years before.
Mr. Freyer stages opera like a painter, applying his own imagery and symbolism to the work without always referring directly to the libretto.
It is an ambitious, challenging work to a very fine libretto by David Malouf, with a dramatic consistency which is only finally undermined by the unevenness of the music. The subject is a wonderfully potent one.
John Dew directs both productions; Michael John LaChiusa has written the libretto for "Roses" and created a new English version of "Beauty."
One reviewer, having pondered the frightful libretto, wondered: Did W.S. Gilbert live and die in vain?
What still seems the most heartfelt and genuinely affecting of his published prose is the lengthy preface he wrote to his libretto for Michael Berkeley's anti-nuclear oratorio Or Shall We Die?
Has Wilson developed at all in two decades? Faustus was written as a libretto by Gertrude Stein in 1938 but never composed by anyone.
Giusti was not much of a poet, and his stilted, predictable verses sound like a poor libretto without accompaniment.
A few years later, with a libretto duly supplied by Ms Grice, the piece provided this small, game company with its first full-length world premiere. Of course it was impossible.
The result is an evening of pure charm. Mascagni was aware that some critics ascribed the runaway success of Cav to the stark realism of its libretto.
Before studying the libretto, she learned the Cyrillic alphabet. She also read most of Tolstoy's novel.
"R&Z" is mostly second-rate Rossini hitched to a libretto of nearly unlimited idiocy.
The 38-year-old Reise, who teaches music at the University of Pennsylvania, also wrote the libretto.
Although the libretto has been translated for this production by Michael Feingold, almost none of the words are comprehensible in the ceaseless, high-pitched but musically gripping brouhaha.
About 1960, Shostakovich wrote the score and a literary ally, L.N. Lebedinsky, wrote the libretto for "Rayok."
That, alone, might have ensured a throng of Soviet theatergoers. But Andrei Vosnesensky, a leading Soviet poet, added two other politically daring elements in his libretto.
And there is indeed much to be said for it despite a dopey libretto that bears passing resemblance to "The Student Prince" (except that Rossini's disguised is not some German princeling, but the ruler of half the world).