In 1961 the team wrote the only musical comedy libretto they did together, The Gay Life, an adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler's play The Affairs of Anatol, starring Walter Chiari and Barbara Cook.
The only hazard to this libretto is that their conflict, which has become an iconic representation of the tension between top-down and organic notions of urbanism, was one in which most contact was indirect.
This manuscript, according to music historian Ellen Rosand, "bristles with the immediacy of a performance", and is the only copy of the libretto that mentions Monteverdi by name.
Although Boito's wordy libretto removed the only Welshman in Shakespeare's original, parson Hugh Evans, the Land of Song can also take great pride in Rhys Meirion's resonant Fenton.
Bremner's libretto is not the only new element.
Between these projects, he started to compose an opera called Mandragora, to a libretto by Sergei Rachinskii; the only music he completed was a short chorus of Flowers and Insects.
If only the libretto had undergone a radical rewrite before the final version went to press.
The production won ten Tony Awards, including Best Musical, Best Score and Best Libretto, and it is the only musical production to win Tony Awards in all four acting categories.
Based on David Belasco's The Girl of the Golden West, the libretto is only mildly mawkish and the orchestral writing, starting with a shocking splayed orchestral chord, is among Puccini's most impassioned.
The only thing ugly about the opera is its overwritten libretto.
