- Book Synopsis
- The first appearance of Alice Goodman's two internationally-renowned and controversial libretti, alongside one of her masterful translations. An NYRB Classics Original Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer played a crucial role in bringing opera back to life as a contemporary art form, and they have been popular-and, in the case of Klinghoffer, highly controversial-ever since they were first staged by the director Peter Sellars in the eighties and nineties. Both operas were conceived from the start as collaborations between composer and writer, and their power is due as much to the dazzlingly constructed and deeply felt libretti of the poet Alice Goodman as they are to John Adams's music. Nixon in China is a story, at once heroic, comic, and unnerving, of men and women making history and of their different conceptions of what history is and what it means to makes it. Klinghoffer, by contrast, has at its center the tragedy of an innocent man condemned at the cost of his life to play a part in history. History Is Our Mother, which takes its title from a line sung by the title character in Nixon in China, brings Goodman's two libretti together for the first time in book form. Included alongside Goodman's no less inspired translation of Emanuel Schikaneder's famous libretto to The Magic Flute, these vivid dramas of character and searching meditations on fate are here revealed as among the most original, ambitious, and accomplished poetic achievements of our time.
- About The Author
- Alice Goodman is a poet, librettist, and Anglican priest. She serves as a rector for several parishes in Cambridgeshire, England. James Williams teaches English and American literature at the University of York.
- Product Details
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- ISBN
- 9781681370644
- Format
- Paperback
- Publisher
- New York Review Books, (24 August 2017)
- Number of Pages
- 240
- Weight
- 236 grams
- Language
- English
- Dimensions
- 203 x 127 x 13 mm
- Series:
- See all books in this series
- Categories: