There's no question that the composer Dave Malloy's "Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812" breaks many of the rules that have accrued around American musical theater, from its mostly unrhymed lyrics and sung-through libretto, adapted from a small portion of Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace," to the eclectic blend of classical and electro-pop sounds.
As you go through the libretto scene by scene, you realize that the concept works brilliantly.
Early in the gestation of Tristan und Isolde, Wagner organised a solo read-through of the libretto – written, as usual, by himself – to a few friends who included a potent trio: his wife, Minna, his latest object of desire, Mathilde Wesendonck, and his future wife, Cosima, still comfortably married to his loyal friend, the conductor Hans von Bülow.
Similar questions of intention and tone are raised by Laura Harrington's awkward libretto, run through with platitudes about making the "world a better place".
A current of self-denial runs through "Caroline," from a libretto that refuses to sentimentalize its heroine to its deliberately fragmented score that avoids anthems of uplift.
Halfway through the album's libretto, Zappa expressed the belief, that governments believe, that people are inherently criminals, and continue to invent laws, which gives states the legal grounds to arrest people, leading to the fictional criminalization of music, which occurs towards the end of the album's storyline.
Before that, a ballet could be copyrighted only through its story line or libretto.
(And, really, have you ever worked your way through a canonical Italian opera libretto, line by line?) In any case the music is thrilling: charged with urgency, rich in memorable melody and propulsive rhythms that sometimes evolve midsong.
The opera's two acts are organized into 10 scenes — Mr. Harbison also wrote the libretto — that pass politely through most of the novel's major plot points and classic lines.
His early reading of Hegel and his successors transformed him into a political revolutionary and shaped his librettos through "Der Ring des Nibelungen".
As Hanif revises the libretto, he and Fairouz sift through ideas in long telephone calls.
