Dana Gioia: evaluation

Transcript context

…What do you think of the libretto for Jerome Kern’s Show Boat? I think if you go to these classic musicals like Show Boat, they have tremendously fine lyrics. Annie Get Your Gun. [laughs] Who wouldn’t have wanted to write the lyrics for that show? I don’t find that as much in contemporary musicals, and I don’t find it hardly at all in contemporary operas. The opera is what Wagner called a Gesamtkunstwerk, a combined artwork. It combines stagecraft poetry, music, acting, et cetera, et cetera. If you have one element of that combination that doesn’t work, the whole doesn’t work. In the same way that if you have a singer with a bad voice, opera doesn’t work. I think that writing great lyrics is what makes a lot of musical theater from opera to cabaret either excellent or lousy. Was Joseph Kerman correct to suggest the Tristan was Wagner’s greatest most integrated work as a whole? In part because of the synthesis of ideas, music, lyrics, history.…

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