This led to the hybrid nature of some 18th-century operas, including two works using librettos derived from the plays of Pierre de Beaumarchais Il barbiere di Siviglia (1782; The Barber of Seville), by Giovanni Paisiello, and Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro (1786; The Marriage of Figaro)—as well as Il matrimonio segreto (1792; The Secret Marriage), by Domenico Cimarosa.
In the 1630s Venetian opera became a public spectacle, and audiences used printed librettos to follow the drama.
In a roundabout way the Stravinsky was the inspiration for Mr. Soldier's work, which uses a libretto by Kurt Vonnegut.
Mozart began work on it in 1779 or 1780, using a libretto by Johann Andreas Schachtner about a slave girl, Zaide, who had rejected the amorous advances of the Sultan Soliman because she was in love with Gomatz.
An Italian composer set to music an episode in English history using a libretto based on a truncated version of an Italian translation – stick with it – of a play by a German who lived two centuries after the events described and made up the single pivotal plot twist.
Fleishman had begun the work while he was a student, using a libretto by Alexander Preis (who also wrote the text for Shostakovich's own Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk) taken from a Chekhov short story about a coffin-maker who plays violin in his town's klezmer band.
When it became clear that Ligeti would be unable to realize his dream project — he died last year, after a long illness — Chin set to work on an Alice opera of her own, using a libretto co-written by herself and the playwright David Henry Hwang.
He used the 1935 libretto and music.
The biblical texts used in the libretto evoke human suffering, and the work ends with an uplifting praise of God.
It is telling that in Philippe Quinault's libretto, used by both Lully and Gluck, the illusions spun to trap Renaud's (the French Rinaldo's) fellow soldiers take the form of their past loves.
