Libretto

• 1. Introduction

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  The libretto is the text at the heart of an opera, oratorio, cantata, or musical theatre piece. Its name comes from the Italian diminutive of libro, meaning "book," so a libretto is literally a "little book." That small word carries an enormous question: in a sung drama, whose words actually matter?

  For centuries, composers took top billing and librettists were lucky to get a footnote. Lorenzo Da Ponte, one of the most accomplished text writers of the 18th century, complained in his own memoirs that late 18th-century London reviews rarely mentioned the librettist's name at all. Some libretti from the 17th century survive today without any record of who wrote them.

  Yet the words were always there, shaping every note. The libretto supplied not just lyrics but spoken dialogue, stage directions, and the entire architecture of a story. It told the composer what a character was feeling at the moment they opened their mouth to sing. Without it, the music would have no one to speak for.

  How did this strange, unequal partnership between poets and composers take shape? Why did Italian dominate European opera for so long? And what happens when the words and music refuse to fit together neatly in translation? Those are the questions worth following.

• 2. Poets Behind the Music

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  Pietro Trapassi, who wrote under the pen name Metastasio and lived from 1698 to 1782, was regarded as one of the most celebrated librettists in all of Europe. His texts were set to music by so many different composers that his name became synonymous with the genre itself.

  Lorenzo Da Ponte brought a more concentrated brilliance to the same era, writing the libretti for three of Mozart's greatest operas as well as texts for many other composers. One man's words, many composers' music.

  The 19th century brought its own prolific figures. Eugène Scribe supplied words for Meyerbeer, Auber, Bellini, Donizetti, Rossini, and Verdi, making him one of the most productive librettists the form had ever seen. His partnership with Meyerbeer was especially enduring. The French writing duo of Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy contributed to works by Jacques Offenbach, Jules Massenet, and Georges Bizet.

  Arrigo Boito occupied a unique position: he wrote libretti for Giuseppe Verdi and Amilcare Ponchielli, but he was also a composer himself, producing two operas of his own. The line between writer and composer was not always fixed.

  Alban Berg crossed that line decisively in another direction, adapting Georg Büchner's play Woyzeck as the libretto for his own opera Wozzeck. The source was a pre-existing dramatic text, not a poem written to order, a reminder that librettists drew from wherever the stories were.

• 3. Who Writes First

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  Richard Wagner solved the composer-librettist problem by becoming both. His method was to transform Germanic legends and historical events into the epic subjects of his operas and music dramas, writing every word himself. Hector Berlioz took the same route for two of his best-known works, La damnation de Faust and Les Troyens.

  But Wagner also demonstrated how revisable libretti could be. His 1861 revision of the original 1845 Dresden version of Tannhäuser, prepared for Paris audiences, is a well-documented case of a libretto being reshaped for a specific local audience long after the work had premiered.

  Not all composers began with words at all. Mikhail Glinka, Alexander Serov, Rimsky-Korsakov, Puccini, and Mascagni at various times wrote passages of music without any text and then had librettists add words to the vocal melody lines afterward. The melody came first; the words were fitted to it.

  The collaboration between Rimsky-Korsakov and his librettist Vladimir Belsky worked the other way, as a close joint development of material. Fiddler on the Roof shows how the modern musical formalised multiple authorial roles: Jerry Bock composed the music, Sheldon Harnick wrote the lyrics, and Joseph Stein wrote the book, meaning the spoken dialogue and stage directions. In the rarest cases, a single writer handled almost everything. Lionel Bart wrote the music, lyrics, and libretto for Oliver!, leaving only the dance arrangements to others.

  Rodgers and Hammerstein eventually settled on writing the lyrics before the music, which Richard Rodgers preferred. Their earlier partnership, Rodgers and Hart, had sometimes worked the other way around.

• 4. Verse, Prose, and Borrowed Dialogue

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  From its inception around 1600, the opera libretto was written in verse. That convention held well into the 19th century, though genres with spoken dialogue had always alternated verse in musical numbers with spoken prose in between.

  George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess marks one of the clearest illustrations of the shift toward prose. Much of its recitative is set directly from DuBose and Dorothy Heyward's play Porgy, composed into music as written, in plain prose. The arias, duets, trios, and choruses were set in verse, but the connective tissue of the drama ran in everyday speech.

  Musicals pulled dialogue from their source material even more freely. Oklahoma! borrowed from Lynn Riggs's Green Grow the Lilacs. Carousel drew from Ferenc Molnár's Liliom. My Fair Lady took most of its spoken lines word-for-word from George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion. Man of La Mancha was adapted from the 1959 television play I, Don Quixote, which supplied most of the dialogue. The 1954 musical Peter Pan used J. M. Barrie's original lines.

  Show Boat, though substantially different from Edna Ferber's source novel, still borrowed some of Ferber's original dialogue, including during the miscegenation scene. Lionel Bart's Oliver! took chunks of dialogue from Charles Dickens's novel Oliver Twist, while billing itself only as a "free adaptation."

  Printed scores and separately published text books sometimes diverge in instructive ways. The aria "Nessun dorma" from Puccini's Turandot ends in the libretto with the lines "Tramontate, stelle! All'alba, vincerò!" In the score as sung, those lines expand: "Tramontate, stelle! Tramontate, stelle! All'alba, vincerò! Vincerò! Vincerò!" The score repeats what the libretto states only once.

• 5. The Translation Problem

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  Italian dominated European opera, outside France, well through the 18th century and into the next, reaching as far as Russia, where the Italian opera troupe in Saint Petersburg competed with an emerging native Russian repertory. Significant departures before 1800 appeared in Purcell's works, Handel's early operas, and the ballad opera and Singspiel traditions of the 18th century.

  Translating a libretto has never been simple. A translator named Louis Durdilly once rendered the entire libretto of Cosi fan tutte into French, dialogues and airs together. The opera became Ainsi font toutes, ou la Fidélité des femmes. The character Ferrando, who sings "Un' aura amorosa" in the original Italian, became Fernand, singing "Ma belle est fidèle autant qu'elle est belle."

  Sometimes productions split the difference. Foreign works with spoken dialogue, especially comedies, were sometimes performed with the sung portions in the original language and only the spoken sections in the local vernacular. This approach works reasonably well in shows where lyrics and plot operate somewhat independently. For musicals like Show Boat, The Wizard of Oz, My Fair Lady, and Carousel, where the lyrics carry the story forward, leaving the songs untranslated while translating the dialogue creates a disjointed experience.

  The availability of printed or projected translations has made singing in the original language more practical in modern opera houses. Even so, the desire to hear a sung drama in one's own language has never disappeared, and it shapes production decisions to this day. Spanish television and cinema picked up the word libreto to mean a script or screenplay, and libretista to mean a playwright or screenwriter, both terms carrying their meanings directly from the operatic tradition.

• 6. Credit and Standing

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  By the 20th century, a handful of librettists broke through to genuine name recognition, most often when attached to a famous pairing. Gilbert and Sullivan became a brand. Rodgers and Hammerstein became a brand. But these were exceptional cases.

  The usual rule was subordination. The composer of the musical score received top billing for the completed work. The lyricist was named in second place, if at all. Even in the late 18th century, Da Ponte noted the invisibility of his role in London reviews.

  Gertrude Stein was a notable exception, receiving top billing for Four Saints in Three Acts. Alberto Franchetti's 1906 opera La figlia di Iorio was adapted from a play by Gabriele D'Annunzio, who was a celebrated Italian poet, novelist, and dramatist at the time. D'Annunzio's authorship was so well known that the opera's literary origin could not be overlooked.

  Sometimes the operatic version of a literary work eclipsed the text it came from. Claude Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande, drawn from a play by Maurice Maeterlinck, is now far better known than its source.

  The philosophical question of which matters more, the music or the words, has itself inspired dramatic works. Richard Strauss explored it in Capriccio. Antonio Salieri posed it even more directly in the title of his work Prima la musica e poi le parole, which translates as First the music, then the words. That the question could fill a whole opera suggests how unresolved it has remained.