Its model was Jugar con fuego, though its libretto and structure were still modeled after French and Italian opera and operetta.
Yet the canny layering of popular musical elements, in tandem with Scribe and Delavigne's neatly structured libretto, creates a sense of events in motion.
Mr. Hwang's libretto uses a flashback structure to tell the story.
This may be the most controversial musical score of the 1970's It ranges from classical fragments (the libretto consists of formal structure - the Catholic Mass - interrupted by songs of doubt) through popular musical forms.
Critic Barbara Russano Hanning writes that Striggio's verses are less subtle than those of Rinuccini, although the structure of Striggio's libretto is more interesting.
Campbell, whose opera "Silent Night" won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Music, structured much of his libretto for "As One" on Reed's personal experiences as a transgender woman.
The Hymn to Saint Cecilia (1942) recovered an English 17th-century sense of musical form while its libretto by Auden showed the same dazzling combination of a classical structure being interpreted by a modernist temperament.
But the opera's libretto, Mr. Harwood explained, was "not important" to his reasons for structuring a comic drama around one of its central musical moments.
The libretto's narrative encouraged montage but discouraged collage as a structuring process - it would have been too easy to make a musical equivalent of the Schwitters paste-up process.
Within a decade, South Pacific earned its creators $5 billion; they enraged Logan, co-author of the libretto, by refusing to share the copyright with him, because, as they said, their 'financial structure' forbade it.
