The libretto, read by a cast of eight, seemed inspired by music's secret: the silence, ever present behind the notes, allowing the mind to wander free.
"Twelve millennia of bricks are piled up here," reads the libretto.
The women sing a "Chorus of Exiled Palestinians": "My father's house was razed/In 1948," reads Alice Goodman's libretto, "When the Israelis passed/Over our street". The accompanying orchestra pulses delicately, the vocal lines elegiac, ornamented at times in nearly Arabic fashion.
He wrote his own libretto, an 86-page text that reads at times like a theological compendium complete with about 100 footnotes.
Gary Wolf, an early Wired employee, was among them, and he has written a deceptively deadpan recollection that reads more like a libretto than a straightforward work of journalism.
If you try to read librettos as poems or plays you will be disappointed.
We'll study the musicals themselves by reading libretti, listening to music, seeing taped and live performances, researching production histories, and analyzing popular, critical, and scholarly reception.
Students are reading libretti, listening to music, viewing taped and live performances, researching production histories, analyzing popular, critical, and scholarly reception to Sondheim's works, as well as hearing first-hand from visiting professionals.
"So I read the libretto and listened to the music very carefully and realised it was not unlike Mansfield Park.
Meanwhile, as far as the words go, Boyd says Paterson has come up with best English libretto he's ever read.
