There are also samples of music playing — some of the many settings of Milton's texts, their composers ranging from Handel and Haydn to Penderecki and the heavy-metal band Cradle of Filth.
She has a long list of enticing texts about composers.
Spem in alium nunquam habui, ( Latin: "Hope in Any Other Have I None" or "In No Other Is My Hope") motet (short musical setting of a sacred text) by English composer Thomas Tallis, noted for its complex use of counterpoint in a composition for 40 voices.
The simplicity, however, was belied by Pierre Audi's insightful and imaginative stage direction; he trusted the text and the composer's dramatic sense - which some directors find it hard to do - and enhanced the narrative without distorting it.
Its text, by poet-composer-saxophonist Joseph Jarman, had been interpreted far differently by Jarman himself on an important 1966 recording.
Almost everyone agrees that Da Ponte supplied Mozart with better texts than the composer had ever worked with, and that the operas the two men produced together are among the greatest in the international repertory.
It opened with Mussorgsky's "Nursery," a song cycle set to texts by the composer that draw on archetypal childhood emotions including fear, shame and the conflicting feelings of compassion and power elicited by animals.
Framing Mr. Biss's impressive turn with "Images" and "Estampes" were the "Ariettes Oubliées," in which Dominique Labelle, a soprano, luxuriated in the Verlaine texts, and the composer's sole string quartet.
The piece, however, has dead spots that are not the production's fault: awkward quasi-Romantic thrusts, clumsy texts (by the composer), and in particular, the slow and leaden start of Act I. Blitzstein's jazz-band insertions seem almost gratuitous, although they sound fine, and the progress of the piece seems almost to stop or at least to digress to allow a place for them.
The form and structure of a piece are visible and verifiable in the composer's text.
