Richard KOSTELANETZ

from 1001 CONTEMPORARY OPERA LIBRETTI-III





An athletic young man, suddenly religious, too poor to fly by airplane, dons home-made wings to gain direct access to the Pope.  Though reported to the police as an unidentified flying object, he succeeds in his mission.

The patrician fiancée of a smuggler becomes a nun.

In a pocket of a jacket left to her for repairs a lonely woman tailor finds a love letter that gives her so much vicarious pleasure that she neglects the pressing equipment, accidentally setting off a fire alarm; among her rescuers is a handsome fireman who, before returning to work, makes a date for the following Saturday night.

An attractive young woman sleeps with enough enemy soldiers to penetrate the headquarters, where she decapitates the general of the army besieging her city.

In a country split by a war between socialists and anti-socialists, two farm workers initiate a love affair that they expect will culminate in marriage, should the socialists succeed.

A terribly attractive man, having survived the domestic designs of six wives, is house-broken by a seventh, who makes him the father and principal provider of six children.

A group of underpaid immigrants organize a union, even though their leader is murdered by the police and their meeting hall torched by arsonists.

The king's bride-to-be is charged with promiscuity by a scheming minister who covets the woman for himself, his deceit aided by a yet more diabolical assistant minister who fabricates forged photographic images of her purported transgressions.

A politically awakened wife of a corporate mogul marries her husband's anarchist executioner.
After a couple moves from one city to another, the husband discovers, in the course of making love to his wife, that she has become a human radio receiver, thanks to the silver fillings in her teeth.

An illiterate farm girl successfully solves three riddles propounded in three languages by a trilingual but simple-minded king.

A teenager plants a bomb that blows up the personal car used by the chief of the invaders who had desecrated sacred lands and murdered his mother and sister.

Two girls meet three soldiers, who vie with one another for each girl's favors until they all decide it would be better for all if they were joined by a third girl.

A newspaper reporter whose specialty is exposing political corruption makes everyone suspicious by marrying the widow of a slain gangster.

The head of the police vice squad discovers that the most notorious prostitute in town is actually his daughter who ran away from home a decade before.

A fraudulent psychic cons himself into experiencing hallucinations and in terror murders his crippled assistant, believing him to be haunted.

When the mother of fourteen children boasts of her fecundity, she arouses the lethal wrath of the relatively infertile dictatorial matriarch.

A blonde maiden magically sprouts wings to free herself from rapists who are subsequently captured by flying policemen.

When a group of male travelers become stranded on a sandbar at high tide, one of them robs and murders a banker, absconding as well with his mistress.

An innocent traveler walks into a mythical village that appears only once a year, for only twenty-four hours, after disappearing several centuries before in response to a plague of witches.

A predatory general is brought to trial at the entrance to heaven and, before a tribunal of common people, is sentenced to death for his crimes against humanity, notwithstanding his claim to have served his country in over one hundred battles.

The princess who mysteriously loses her breasts becomes a man, prompting her outraged husband, the prince, to become a woman if the illusion of royal normalcy is to be preserved, causing so much confusion, both private and public, that both decide simultaneously to resume their original sexual identities.

A series of misfortunes prepare the protagonist for surprising good fortune.

In a dramatic night flight over mountains, the pilot of a single-engine plane fights threatening winds.
A gangster pirate deliberately sends false signals to ships on stormy nights to cause their destruction and then rob the wreckage until a sailor who survives a shipwreck takes revenge on the pirate by kidnapping him and then depositing him, bound up, in a dingy that is pushed out to sea.

One sister outfoxes the others in inheriting the bulk of their father's estate.

A worldly young blonde who leeches on a slightly less worldly sugar daddy boasts that "diamonds are a girl's best friend."

The dictator who rapes his virgin sister-in-law, cutting out her tongue to prevent her from reporting the crime to his wife, in turn suffers revenge when the mute woman kills his eldest male child, her nephew, and serves the boy's roasted body at a royal feast.

A happily married contemporary couple get into a marriage-shattering fight after viewing a film about life on a primitive island.

A married woman teases her former rival-in-love about her inability to find a husband, while the audience recognizes that the single woman actually has the more fortunate life.

The wife of a dead gangster reluctantly marries his slayer who is tormented by memories of his yet undetected crime and is induced to confess when he suspects, several months later, that his ex-wife's child might have actually been fathered by her previous husband.

A reluctant bridegroom jumps out of a ground-floor window in order to escape marriage and, he thinks, swift divorce.

After two political dissidents are beheaded, their widows, on hand to claim their husbands' bodies, argue passionately over which head belongs to which torso.

A chorus girl, in love with the theater's assistant manager, gently resists the amorous advances of an electrician whom she also knows as the assistant manager's best friend.

A repellingly ugly man inexplicably attract a series of stunningly attractive women.

An alienated, hyper-sensitive intellectual, adrift in a disorienting post-War city, is arrested on unspecified charges and tried by hooded, anonymous judges.

A cunning con-man from the city gets provincial farmers to supply him first with liquor and then women.
A prim young woman is hired by a profligate monarch to teach writing and 'rithmetic to the children of his wives and concubines.

A young man, spurned by his girl friend, retires to a monastery only to discover that, because of insufficient piety, he must return to a sensual reunion with his apologetic lover.

When a man accidentally encounters the greatest love of his life, whom he mistakenly rejected twenty years before, each is them is prompted to remember the affair and their lives since.

A provincial Moslem woman who learns about feminist emancipation during marriage abandons her polygamous husband in the dead of night, goes to the city for an education, and becomes a scientist honored on her triumphant return home.

Even in the daytime, a young woman imagines herself pursued by a man with a whip and a woman armed with a baseball bat.

When a food wholesaler breaks his promise to marry a farmer's daughter, the young woman, no longer a virgin, decides to leave his family and go to the city alone.

A frustrated government clerk impersonates the chief of police in order to arrest something untouchable to the regular police—the mayor of the town.




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