sentences:  The libretto is a compact version of the play, being faithful to its "exuberantly vulgar vision of a world taken over by the lowest form of bourgeois avarice and greed".The composer labeled the work an opera buffa.It was his first and only comic and satirical opera, and uses models by Jacques Offenbach, Gioachino Rossini, Dmitri Shostakovich and Alfred Schnittke.