A gifted librettist might have better touched upon its complexities.
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"It's quite challenging to be your own librettist," he said.
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He was persuaded by his librettist to make it an opera.
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I am a writer, librettist, and an arts and literature teacher.
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"Singing is the embodiment of inner beauty," a librettist tells Bergner philosophically.
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Mr. Goldstein, 40, won the prize for the most promising musical theater librettist.
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It was a huge process and I worked with librettist Mark Doten on that.
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Paul Peers, the librettist, also directs; Tina Mitchell sings the lead; David Bloom conducts.
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"This theme and my libretto are yours by right of conquest," the librettist wrote.
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The lyricist, librettist and producer Oscar Hammerstein owned a Tudor-style house in Kings Point.
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Mark Doten, the Librettist, helped me find some really poetic fragments of the logs, too.
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The bride is a maternal granddaughter of Alan Jay Lerner, the American lyricist and librettist.
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Most disturbing of all, perhaps, Ms. Du and her brilliant librettist, Royce Vavrek, refuse to moralize.
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Most members of the creative team—composer, librettist, stage director and production designer—have Chinese backgrounds.
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Is opera a battle for power among the composer, the librettist, the singers and the director?
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The bride, 313, is a musical theater lyricist and the groom, also 29, is a librettist.
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The bride, 29, is a musical theater lyricist and the groom, also 29, is a librettist.
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To underestimate the contribution of the librettist is to fundamentally not understand how a musical is made.
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The musical was created by Shay Alon, an Israeli composer, and Christopher Delarue, a young French librettist.
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A new prologue features the composer and librettist planning their next opera and admiring some Japanese objects.
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"Industry standard is that composer, librettist, and bookwriter are each paid 1/3," Knight wrote in her email.
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The new opera, composed by Paul Moravec and librettist Mark Campbell, favours the Jack Torrance of the novel.
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The opera was written by two Americans, Andrew Flack, the librettist, and Paul Fowler, who composed the music.
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Most valuable is a fresh staging of John Adams' seminal "Doctor Atomic," directed by its librettist, Peter Sellars.
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Ms. Kron, 55, who already has an impressive body of work, won for most promising musical theater librettist.
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Another composer and librettist might have been tempted to flesh out the story into a drama with three characters.
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Like "Cassandra," it was created in collaboration with the librettist Luigi Illica, best known for his work with Puccini.
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Strauss composed "Die Frau ohne Schatten" in close collaboration with his librettist, the extraordinary Viennese poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal.
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Abrahamsen and his co-librettist, Henrik Engelbrecht, hew more closely than most of their predecessors to the Andersen original.
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The opera was performed by M. Lamar and co-composed by Hunter Hunt-Hendrix and co-librettist Tucker Culbertson.
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A second marriage in 1987 to Alice Goodman, a librettist turned Anglican priest 26 years younger, was a happier reason.
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Emerging out of the Enlightenment, Mozart and his great librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte, sought to demonstrate just what enlightenment means.
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"It bombed, and disappeared without a trace," said Mr. Ruders, who noted that he was working with an inexperienced librettist.
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The Oscar-winning screenwriter and first-time Broadway librettist shares what she watched, read and listened to in a week.
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Mr. Teichtmeister is following the tradition of the 1791 premiere, in which Papageno was played by Mozart's librettist, Emanuel Schikaneder.
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Mr Bell and the librettist, Emma Jenkins, were determined to "restore humanity and dignity to those women whose lives were stolen".
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Mazzoli's favorite collaborator is the prolific librettist Royce Vavrek, who has shaken up the timid, backward-looking business of American opera.
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Benjamin had been looking to work with a librettist for years, despite his doubts about the viability of the operatic form.
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The first lie of Strauss and his librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal — the one I will call "the obvious lie" — concerns inevitability.
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The essential Prototype festival opens with the premiere of this opera by the composer Garrett Fisher and the librettist Ellen McLaughlin.
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In 2018, she received the Kleban Prize, one of two cash prizes of $100,000 given to a lyricist and a librettist.
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Alan Schmuckler and Amanda Yesnowitz were given the lyricist prize, while Christian Duhamel is the recipient of this year's librettist award.
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The composer, director and librettist have known each other since they were teenagers growing up in Kaunas, Lithuania's second most populated city.
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Debussy, facing the gnomic text of "Pelléas," made the radical decision to set it line by line, without recourse to a versifying librettist.
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"People are going to see the story through a different lens because of Ferguson and Black Lives Matter," Todd Kreidler, the librettist, predicted.
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Mr. Sharon's "Sweet Land" partners include, as co-director, Cannupa Hanska Luger, an interdisciplinary artist who was raised on the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota; Raven Chacon, a Navajo composer and installation artist; Du Yun, the Pulitzer Prize-winning, Chinese-born composer; Aja Couchois Duncan, a librettist and writer of Ojibwe descent; and Douglas Kearney, an African-American poet and librettist.
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Brian Yorkey, the librettist behind the Tony Award-winning musical Next To Normal, wrote the pilot, which was picked up to series by Netflix.
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Miranda consulted Assassins librettist John Weidman while writing Hamilton because he was interested in the way Assassins blended historical narrative with implicit contemporary commentary.
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"JFK" is the result, a provocative new work by the fast-rising duo of the composer David T. Little and the librettist Royce Vavrek.
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The opera foreshadows the assassination but does not directly deal with the event, composer Little and librettist Royce Vavrek said in a joint statement.
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Lully was a man of formulas, as was his prized librettist, Philippe Quinault: spare melodies unfold over gravely dancing rhythms, every word made clear.
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At the heart of this 1885 operetta by the librettist William Gilbert and the composer Arthur Sullivan is a satire skewering British bureaucratic zeal.
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Fey, who wrote the original screenplay, teamed up with her husband Jeff Richmond and librettist Nell Benjamin for a musical version of the 2004 film.
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In it, he and Martin Crimp, his librettist, retell the story of Edward II, a 14th-century English king, and his supposed lover Piers Gaveston.
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Another collaboration with the librettist Royce Vavrek, the new work was described as ushering in a new genre of "horror opera" by The Washington Post.
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" With most of Beaumarchais's political asides taken out by Milhaud's librettist, his wife, Madeleine, Mr. Einhorn said that "you're left with this intense character piece.
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This year's festival opened here on Saturday with the premiere of "JFK," an ambitious opera by the composer David T. Little and the librettist Royce Vavrek.
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It would seem that Mr. London, a leader of klezmer groups in New York, and his librettist, the playwright Elise Thoron, have some explaining to do.
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Representing the world in art is portrayed by Mr. Benjamin and the librettist, the playwright Martin Crimp, as a complex, empowering, exposing, explosive, inevitably destructive enterprise.
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They were made in Vermont at the house where the poet and librettist Kenward Elmslie and the artist and writer Joe Brainard lived during the summer.
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It purports to be a paean to the great librettist Oscar Hammerstein II, whose work with the composers Jerome Kern and Richard Rodgers revolutionized musical theater.
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"Nureyev" was postponed at the last minute in July, and its librettist, director and designer, Kirill Serebrennikov, remains under house arrest, accused of embezzling state funds.
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Like Rossini, Mozart, working with the librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte, softened the sharpest edges of the text's anti-royalist barbs to pass muster with Austrian censors.
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Writing a libretto, formerly a text dashed off in a few weeks, became a full collaboration between a composer and a librettist that could take years.
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That work, commissioned by the company from the composer Jack Perla and the librettist Rajiv Joseph (best known as a playwright), was elegantly directed by James Robinson.
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Daniel Goldstein, who wrote the book and was a writer of the lyrics for "Unknown Soldier," won the 2016 Kleban Prize for most promising musical theater librettist.
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This was nowhere more impressive than at the end of the opera, which the composer and librettist see as offering an equivocal kind of hope for the future.
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The work is being expanded by its composer, Huang Ruo, and librettist, David Henry Hwang, from an hourlong version they wrote for the Washington National Opera in 2014.
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The librettist Greg Pierce deserves much credit for the dramatic urgency of the opera, which unfolds as a series of short, telling scenes, some of which overlap effectively.
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Other artists include the lyricist, librettist and playwright Stacey Luftig, who won the $100,000 Kleban Prize in 2016 and is writing "Saving Amelia" with the composer Phillip Palmer.
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The main resulting innovation is a new prologue, written by Mr. Auxier, which frames the operetta as the fantasy of a Victorian librettist, caused by mild head trauma.
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She's overseen by a lecherous monster until Perseus comes to her rescue, which is where Ibert and his librettist (and brother-in-law), Michel Veber, throw in a twist.
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The challenge with taking an old-fashioned approach to opera, as the composer and librettist do in "Jane Eyre," is that the resulting work invites comparisons with classic masterpieces.
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In this new musical from the Tony-nominated composer and librettist Dave Malloy, the first in his Signature Theater residency, eight strangers gather to discuss their internet addictions, musically.
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The venue formerly known as the Mark Hellinger Theater — now operating as the Times Square Church — was the site of the librettist and lyricist Alan Jay Lerner's greatest triumph.
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Presented by Brown Fist Productions, El Circo Anahuac: An Aztec Opera fuses multi-media theatrics with classical music, circus performers, puppetry, and trilingual lyrics written by Librettist Nahuatl poets.
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The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs, an original opus by Pulitzer Prize–winning librettist Mark Campbell and DJ-slash-composer Mason Bates, premieres at the Santa Fe Opera in July.
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Still, I wonder what could have been had Mr. Karchin and his librettist taken more chances and fashioned a dramatic structure that better suited the contemporary style of the music.
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Wladimir Boritsch, the work's librettist and impresario, had all the orchestra parts but gave only the piano score to Lenya when she met with him after Weill's death in 1950.
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It is the culmination of Mr. Muti's cycle with the Chicago Symphony of the three operas that Verdi adapted from Shakespeare, two of them with his most important librettist, Arrigo Boito.
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But composer Ted Hearne chose to make art with it, writing a multimedia opera about the entire turn of events called The Source with librettist Mark Doten and director Daniel Fish.
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The blockbuster production of this year's Prototype festival is the New York City premiere of this Lars von Trier film adaptation, by the composer Missy Mazzoli and the librettist Royce Vavrek.
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The current crop of experimental works presented in spaces across Manhattan and Brooklyn include: The highly acclaimed opera "Dog Days" by the composer David T. Little and the librettist Royce Vavrek; the human-trafficking drama "Angel's Bone" by the composer Du Yun and Mr. Vavrek; "The Good Swimmer," billed as "part Requiem, part lifesaving drill," by the composer Heidi Rodewald and the librettist Donna Di Novelli; and "The Last Hotel" by Donnacha Dennehy and Enda Walsh.
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SAN FRANCISCO — It was a week before the premiere, and Bright Sheng, the composer and co-librettist of the new opera "Dream of the Red Chamber," was already bracing for the backlash.
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The young Salieri got to know Pietro Metastasio, the reigning librettist of eighteenth-century Italian opera, and Christoph Willibald Gluck, whose lucid, elegant style set the tone for the Viennese Classical period.
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The engrossing "Buried Alive," by the gifted young composer Jeff Myers and the librettist Quincy Long, was inspired by Poe's "The Premature Burial," about a New York painter haunted by visions of death.
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" Tom Cairns, who is both the director and the librettist of the Adès opera, said, "If I were directing this, right about now I'd ask someone to get up and smash a plate.
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Since he was a child, he wanted to write operas — "probably it was a bit weird," he said, laughing — but he couldn't find the right musical language, still less a like-minded librettist.
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Jean-Pierre Ponnelle's 1973 staging of this battle of the sexes, framed by Rossini and his librettist as an abduction drama, may be the silliest and most stereotype-laden production in the Met's repertory.
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Along with his collaborators, the choreographer-director Bill T. Jones and the librettist Ann T. Greene, Jenkins produced a sometimes grim, sometimes dizzyingly folkloric opera full of modernist touches and references to the blues.
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As part of the festivities, the Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Museum of Art will present the 1947 American opera "The Mother of Us All" by the composer Virgil Thomson and the librettist Gertrude Stein.
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In his discussion of the role played by the librettist of the "Messiah," Charles Jennens, Keates makes no mention of Michael Marissen's controversial 2014 scholarly polemic about the anti-Semitic character of the work.
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The lyricist, librettist and playwright Stacey Luftig and the writer and director Daniel Goldstein are the recipients of the 2016 Kleban Prize for promising musical-theater writers, the sponsors of the prize announced this week.
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" The show, produced and directed by Harold Prince, had first-rate songs by Stephen Sondheim in the brassy mainstream Broadway tradition, and a clever book by George Furth, who had been the librettist for "Company.
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And in "L'Amour de Loin" ("Love from Afar"), Saariaho's acclaimed first opera, from 2000, which she wrote in collaboration with the librettist Amin Maalouf, she proved that her stylistic approach could work in splendid ways.
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In addition to his work as an author, Mr. Hajdu is a songwriter and librettist, and "Love for Sale" is a fine reminder that criticism, when well executed, need not be walled off from fandom.
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In 1967 the actor, playwright and librettist Jack Larson and his partner, the director and screenwriter James Bridges, purchased it for $60,33; they restored it, preserving the original furniture and coping with its persistently leaky roof.
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The composer John Adams and his frequent collaborator, the librettist and director Peter Sellars, are getting the band back together with "Girls of the Golden West," a new opera about the women of California's Gold Rush.
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Tom Cairns, the librettist, directs this tale of a dinner party that proves inescapable, with a cast that includes Sally Matthews, Sophie Bevan, Alice Coote, Audrey Luna, Iestyn Davies, Joseph Kaiser, Rod Gilfry and John Tomlinson.
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The composer Laura Schwendinger and the librettist Ginger Strand achieve something similar in their potently claustrophobic opera "Artemisia," which received its staged premiere at Trinity Wall Street's St. Paul's Chapel on Thursday (and repeats on Saturday).
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The French poet Théophile Gautier, the librettist responsible for "Giselle" (1841), "wrote about the ideal — and then women's underskirts," Felicia McCarren, a dance historian and professor of French at Tulane University, said in a phone interview.
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"We Shall Not Be Moved," by the composer Daniel Bernard Roumain and the librettist Marc Bamuthi Joseph, inventively directed by Bill T. Jones, has generated the most attention, for tackling roiling issues of race and inequality.
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Gruesome, challenging theater from the composer David Lang and his co-librettist, Mark Dion, in an opera that follows a convicted murderer from confession to dissection, asking questions all the while about the nature of evil.
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Classical Music The blockbuster production of this year's Prototype festival is the New York City premiere of this Lars von Trier film adaptation, by the composer Missy Mazzoli and the librettist Royce Vavrek, with performances Jan.
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It's not surprising that "Dog Days," the utterly bleak and musically original if heavy-handed opera by the composer-librettist team of David T. Little and Royce Vavrek, has won widespread attention since its acclaimed 2012 premiere.
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Four years ago he approached the composer David T. Little and the librettist Royce Vavrek, the inventive team known for the chamber opera "Dog Days," an apocalyptic family drama, who grabbed the idea and ran with it.
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Mr. Hoebee fleetly paces the timeless "Romeo and Juliet" narrative about young lovers divided by their warring clans, which the librettist Arthur Laurents tautly updated to a murderous rivalry among teenage gangs in 1950s New York City.
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Rugile Barzdziukaite, the director; Vaiva Grainyte, the librettist; and Lina Lapelyte, the composer, all in their mid-216s, are the creators of this astounding operatic installation, which their cast will perform for eight hours straight every Saturday.
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Since its premiere in 22018, the opera "Written on Skin," by this British composer and the librettist Martin Crimp, has been produced around the world and acclaimed as one of the most important operas of our time.
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A music review on Saturday about a concert performance of Verdi's opera "Falstaff," by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at Orchestra Hall in Chicago, misstated the number of operas that Verdi adapted from Shakespeare with the librettist Arrigo Boito.
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PHILADELPHIA — If opera is the art of emotional extremity, few subjects are as operatic as "Breaking the Waves," the 1996 Lars von Trier film that has been adapted by the composer Missy Mazzoli and the librettist Royce Vavrek.
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Tom Cairns, the opera's librettist, directs this tale of a dinner party that proves inescapable, with an enormous cast that includes Sally Matthews, Sophie Bevan, Alice Coote, Audrey Luna, Iestyn Davies, Joseph Kaiser, Rod Gilfry and John Tomlinson.
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Keates is content with a standard account of the relationship between composer and librettist, and the differences between the first Dublin version of 1742 and the later revisions for London performances that Handel made between 1743 and 1754.
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Weeks after Knight began work on the project, however, she learned that the rest of the creative team — including the composer and the librettist, who were both men — were receiving a small stipend of $150 each for their work.
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But in a pared-down production by Peter Sellars (also the work's librettist) this summer at Santa Fe Opera — an enormous sphere hung above a bare stage — it was lean and surreal, alternating lush, ominous sensuality and pummeling intensity.
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Show Us Your Wall Having a documentary made about you can prompt reflection, and "Every Act of Life" is having that effect on its subject, the four-time Tony-winning playwright and librettist Terrence McNally, who just turned 80.
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Mr. Fleming, the librettist, said one of the biggest challenges in creating the opera was remaining sensitive to those who knew Mr. Whiteley while staying true to the more salacious aspects of his life, from substance abuse to womanizing.
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The story, by Jean-Nicolas Bouilly, a lawyer turned librettist, is the same one that inspired Beethoven's only stage work: A political prisoner's wife disguises herself as a man to gain access to his dungeon and spring him free.
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In his will, Edward Kleban, the Tony Award-winning lyricist of "A Chorus Line," made provisions to underwrite two cash prizes for musical theater writers whose work shows great potential: one to a lyricist and one to a librettist.
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At the top of Act 2, this jazz-infused show springs forward from the early 1960s to the late 1980s and switches storytellers — a new character, played by a new actor, speaking and singing the words of a new librettist.
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The songs must carry the story line, and the lyricist must work hand-in-hand with the librettist to determine what each song must accomplish dramatically and emotionally and how collectively these songs add up to a satisfying piece of storytelling.
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The composer David T. Little and the librettist Royce Vavrek, whose shocking opera "Dog Days" has toured the nation since its premiere in 2012, will have their new work, "JFK," given its premiere by Fort Worth Opera later this month.
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This week, he shows off a different side of his artistry — including wordless scat riffs — in the role of Charlie Parker for the New York premiere of "Yardbird," an opera by the composer Daniel Schnyder and the librettist Bridgette A. Wimberly.
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Together with the director Oscar Fritz Schuh and the set designer and librettist Caspar Neher, von Einem had a vision of rehabilitating Salzburg as a nexus of cutting-edge artists, a "Weimar of the 123th century," as Neher wrote in 1948.
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" Here he is, arriving at the form of "Follies," his legendary 1971 musical with librettist James Goldman about a reunion of retired performers from a 1930s Ziegfeldesque revue: "You start with the subject matter and some content and it takes form.
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Created by the composer Daniel Bernard Roumain and the librettist Marc Bamuthi Joseph and directed by the acclaimed choreographer Bill T. Jones, the work plays with genre and form, hoping to stretch our expectations of what opera is and can be.
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The Los Angeles Opera announced Thursday that Matthew Aucoin, the rising young composer, conductor and librettist, would become its first artist in residence next fall, and that he would conduct, compose, and work with young artists there over the next three seasons.
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The next production at the Apollo will be in the fall of 2017: the New York premiere of "We Shall Not Be Moved," currently being developed by the composer Daniel Bernard Roumain, the librettist Marc Bamuthi Joseph, and the director Bill T. Jones.
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When their Civil War opera "Appomattox" was revived by the Washington National Opera in 2015, the composer Philip Glass and his librettist, the playwright Christopher Hampton, substantially revised it to make voting rights, which they saw as under assault, its central theme.
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Like "Girls of the Golden West," another collaboration with Peter Sellars (doing double duty as librettist and director), the opera is musically exhilarating but dramatically inert — a flaw that was all too clear when the Metropolitan Opera staged it nearly a decade ago.
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" The book also includes photos from the production, interviews with many of the show's actors and crew members, and excerpts from emails, like one Miranda wrote to his fellow librettist John Weidman in 2009: "I'm trying to turn Hamilton's life into a hip-hop album.
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The opera's librettist, Kasi Lemmons — a writer, actress and film director who has worked with Mr. Blanchard on several of her films, including "Eve's Bayou" and the coming "Harriet," about Harriet Tubman — said that she had been drawn to Mr. Blow's portrayal of his youth.
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The composer Jeanine Tesori, best known for her Tony Award-winning musical "Fun Home," and the librettist-director Tazewell Thompson tell the story of a striving black family in Harlem with a rebellious teenage son who's incensed over police intimidation of young black men.
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Following her husband's orders after he is paralyzed in an accident, Bess, the innocent, trusting victim of "Breaking the Waves" — the 1996 Lars von Trier film, now an opera by the composer Missy Mazzoli and the librettist Royce Vavrek — starts having sex with other men.
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This work, by the composer Anthony Davis and the librettist Richard Wesley, had its premiere at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark by the opera company Trilogy, which is based in that city and promotes and performs the works of black composers.
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Neuwirth and her co-librettist, Catherine Filloux, made the sensible decision to extend the story into the present day, so that we see Orlando in the context of the 1968 social revolutions, the end of the Cold War, and the age of the Internet.
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Ultimately Johnson's answer seems to be that the more fully we can learn to exist without the "social fiction" of coupled togetherness, the more likely we are to be able to live most fully, and usefully, in the world, whether as librettist or librarian, wife or friend.
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The 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising has been a focus of a welcome number of concerts in New York over the past few months, but the world premiere of "Stonewall," by the composer Iain Bell and the librettist Mark Campbell, may be the most important.
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Three one-act operas on themes of sex — featuring an android lover, a private dungeon and a country-house orgy — from the composer-librettist team of Robert Paterson and David Cote, will have their New York debut at BAM after a premiere in Nashville last January.
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Written by the composer Terence Blanchard and the librettist Kasi Lemmons, from a memoir by Charles M. Blow (an Opinion columnist for The New York Times), this opera tells of a childhood shaped by cycles of violence, tough motherly love and the lasting wounds of sexual abuse.
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What she left of "The Nubian Word for Flowers" required completion: by her librettist, creative partner and spouse, the writer and director who goes by Ione; by a team of sound designers; by members of the International Contemporary Ensemble; by collaborators from the company Experiments in Opera.
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The composer Kate Soper won the Virgil Thomson Award in Vocal Music, while the composer Lewis Spratlan and librettist James Maraniss won the Charles Ives Opera Prize for their work "Life Is a Dream," the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which awards the prizes, announced on Tuesday.
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That constant upwelling of emotion is largely the fault of its soaring songbook, much of which was written by the now-famed Hamilton librettist, along with veteran Hollywood composer Mark Mancina and Opetaia Foa'i, the New Zealand-based Pacific music singer-songwriter (for whom Moana is his first IMDB credit).
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But in "Dreamers," an ambitious yet bloated new work that had its premiere here at Zellerbach Hall at the University of California, Berkeley, on Sunday, the composer Jimmy López and the librettist Nilo Cruz tell the stories of undocumented immigrants by elevating their experiences to the mythic realm of oratorios past.
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The program follows two recent commissions at the Apollo: the stage adaptation of Coates's acclaimed book "Between the World and Me," and the opera "We Shall Not Be Moved," a co-commission with Opera Philadelphia that was created by the composer Daniel Bernard Roumain and the librettist Marc Bamuthi Joseph.
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ST. LOUIS — The composer Terence Blanchard and the librettist Kasi Lemmons, the creators of the new opera "Fire Shut Up in My Bones," based on the 2014 memoir, were inspired by the book's wrenching tale of a black boy growing up, the youngest of five brothers, in a segregated rural Louisiana town.
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"Dimitrij," which tells of the first pretender to the throne in Russia after the death of Czar Boris Godunov, picks up where Mussorgsky's "Boris Godunov" leaves off, though it's highly unlikely that Dvorak or his librettist, Marie Cervinkova-Riegrova, knew that earlier opera, which was not produced outside Russia until the 20th century.
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Those names should give you a feel for the level of satire involved, although it is fascinating, and a bit depressing, to realize that in 1954 the show's creators — the composer Jerome Moross and the librettist John Latouche — could count on an audience's familiarity with ancient epics to make the jokes pay off.
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Gotham Chamber Opera is no more, but "Charlie Parker's Yardbird," an ingratiating and fast-paced bio-opera about the jazz giant by the admired Swiss composer Daniel Schnyder (a proud Harlem resident) and the librettist Bridgette A. Wimberly, will be the first opera ever performed at the Apollo Theatre (April 2013 and April 3).
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In the world of New York theater, where everyone knows someone who knows someone who knows someone, Ms. Sussman — "the eternal connector of all good people," said a friend — knew Ms. Sarnak was looking for a librettist, or scene and dialogue writer, for a short musical on which she was working for the New York Film Academy.
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The annual Prototype festival, now at the heart of new opera in New York, concludes on Sunday, but not before it has squeezed in three performances of this opera based on a new, "unpublished" chapter of the Book of Revelation by the librettist Cerise Lim Jacobs and the composer Julian Wachner, the music director at Trinity Wall Street.
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That's what the much-in-demand composer Mason Bates and the librettist Mark Campbell don't seem to have understood in writing "The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs," a trudging new opera about the maestro of Apple that had its premiere at the Santa Fe Opera on Saturday and will travel to San Francisco and Seattle in coming seasons.
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And the recently resuscitated New York City Opera is plunging boldly into the fray, offering the East Coast première of "Hopper's Wife" (April 28-May 1), a surreal chamber-opera fantasy by the composer Stewart Wallace and the librettist Michael Korie that conjures an imagined marriage between the artist Edward Hopper and the gossip columnist Hedda Hopper.
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Its high-powered creative team includes the dazzling set designer and director Julian Crouch (he's worked on "Hedwig and the Angry Inch" on Broadway, and Philip Glass's "Satyagraha" at the Metropolitan Opera); the imaginative composer Paola Prestini; and, most important, the poetic librettist and musician Rinde Eckert, who plays Harold in a tour-de-force and deeply affecting performance.
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In his book The Broadway Musical, Joseph Swain observes: Collaboration in the musical theatre meant that a composer might work with not only a lyricist and a librettist bu also a director, an orchestrator, a choreographer ... It is no coincidence that nearly all the significant works of the Broadway tradition were preceded in their history by a vast amount of experience in every department.
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