# Favorite librettists/librettos



## SilenceIsGolden (May 5, 2013)

I've always found the relationship between librettists and composers and the process of bonding words to music to be quite fascinating. A great librettist has to possess some unique gifts; he has to be an expressive poet and a deft dramatist, with an ability to effectively adapt his source material in a suitable manner for musical treatment. And yet he has to be flexible enough (and clever enough) to adapt his style to the musico-dramtic requirements of the composer and be able to revise their text where necessary.

Let's take this opportunity to celebrate some of our favorite librettists, or perhaps a particular libretto that strikes you as especially accomplished. Of course there are the highly renowned and justly acclaimed names -- Lorenzo Da Ponte, Arrigo Boito, Richard Wagner, Hugo von Hofmannsthal -- what qualities about their librettos are so compelling?

As for me, I'd like to state my general admiration for the librettos of Illica and Giacosa in collaboration for Puccini. Their working relationship may have been a tumultuous one, but it brought out the best in each of them. Their ability to reduce their literary sources into a compact dramatic framework was impressive, as was the way they could expand on an episode lyrically where necessary to make room for Puccini's passionate music. And if you look at a libretto like _Madama Butterfly_, it is all the more substantial for the discourse that took place between the three consummate artists. Not only does it showcase the clash between two cultures and explore politico-social stereotypes, as emphasized by Illica and Giacosa, it makes room for an incredibly moving drama on an individual level, as emphasized by Puccini.


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## elgar's ghost (Aug 8, 2010)

Benjamin Britten was especially blessed in this regard - the librettos by W.H. Auden (Paul Bunyan), Montagu Slater (Peter Grimes) Eric Crozier (Albert Herring and Billy Budd, the latter in collaboration with E.M. Forster) and Myfanwy Piper (Turn of the Screw, Owen Wingrave and Death in Venice) are especially rich in imagery and mood-setting and all dovetail brilliantly into the music.


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

The Wystan Auden / Chester Kallmen libretto for Stravinsky's _A Rake's Progress_ is pretty golden,

as are

Alban Berg's own adaption of the plays of Frank Wedekind's (Erdgeist ~ Earth Spirit, and Die Büchse der Pandora ~ Pandora's Box) for his _Lulu_

and

Colette's magical childhood libretto for Maurice Ravel's _L'enfant et les sortilèges._


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## HumphreyAppleby (Apr 11, 2013)

SilenceIsGolden said:


> As for me, I'd like to state my general admiration for the librettos of Illica and Giacosa in collaboration for Puccini. Their working relationship may have been a tumultuous one, but it brought out the best in each of them. Their ability to reduce their literary sources into a compact dramatic framework was impressive, as was the way they could expand on an episode lyrically where necessary to make room for Puccini's passionate music. And if you look at a libretto like _Madama Butterfly_, it is all the more substantial for the discourse that took place between the three consummate artists. Not only does it showcase the clash between two cultures and explore politico-social stereotypes, as emphasized by Illica and Giacosa, it makes room for an incredibly moving drama on an individual level, as emphasized by Puccini.


Compared with most libretti, what the Giacosa/Illica/Puccini team produced was phenomenal. Even the playwright of _La Tosca_, Victorien Sardou, proclaimed that their libretto was infinitely better than his play. They cut all of the dry exposition; the took out the pseudo-philosophy; and they focused it on the relationships between Tosca-Cavaradossi and Tosca-Scarpia, so that Tosca was in the center of everything that goes on (as is appropriate for an opera called _Tosca_). In their libretti you never find a phrase like you do in _Werther_ (as he gets up again after having been dying for the last 10 minutes): "I am near death." That kind of awkward language is almost entirely absent from all of the mature Puccini operas, in fact.

Puccini also had a good team much later in Simoni/Adami.


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## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

Boito / Verdi was a great combination as was da Ponte / Mozart

Pity Wagner didn't have a better librettist. Or at least a more concise one!


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## Freischutz (Mar 6, 2014)

SilenceIsGolden said:


> he has to be an expressive poet and a deft dramatist


or she...

I come to this question with minimal opera experience only to say that I recently started watching _The Ring_ and have been completely underawed by Wagner's abilities as a librettist. I don't know exactly what I should expect of an opera libretto, but judging it as a literary text within the boundaries of a musical drama, I thought he handled his expositions pretty poorly (i.e. conspicuous and unbelievable interactions and dialogue just to give a nod and a wink to the audience to let them know what the hell's going on)...


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## SilenceIsGolden (May 5, 2013)

Freischutz said:


> or she...


Of course. No disrespect intended there. Alice Goodman's libretto for John Adams' _Nixon in China_ is quite good, for example.



> I come to this question with minimal opera experience only to say that I recently started watching _The Ring_ and have been completely underawed by Wagner's abilities as a librettist. I don't know exactly what I should expect of an opera libretto, but judging it as a literary text within the boundaries of a musical drama, I thought he handled his expositions pretty poorly (i.e. conspicuous and unbelievable interactions and dialogue just to give a nod and a wink to the audience to let them know what the hell's going on)...


A good opera libretto is not meant to stand on it's own as a fully achieved literary text. It needs to leave room for music to fill-in the expressive potential of the of the characters, and so in a sense it needs to be incomplete. It needs to be a framework of words that's adaptable and complimentary to the music. Wagner understood this wonderfully. His librettos are generally highly regarded, and rightly so in my opinion. His texts are full of a unique kind of dramatic symbolism, and he has set them to music in such a way that the finished works an incomparable in their symbolic density and dramatic richness. The overall structures implemented in his librettos are quite striking as well. He adopted his method from the ancient Greek dramatists like Aeschylus of beginning a scene or act very near to a key event while spending the majority of the drama establishing, developing, and exploring the psychological states of the characters, mostly through narration. Dropping hints and clues here and there, piecing together the back-story slowly but surely in an effective build-up. Not everyone finds his dramatic methods compelling, but I've always found it captivating myself.

Wagner also had an astounding capability of finding the perfect poetic language to fit the atmosphere of each of his music dramas. In the _Ring_, for example, he revived ancient stabreim to give an archaic resonance to the poetry, while in an opera like _Die Meistersinger_ he models his poetry on Lutherian German which gives it a flowery and adorning feeling that fits the intricate weavings of the community he depicts in that opera like a glove.


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## schigolch (Jun 26, 2011)

I think that the true quality of a libretto, lies in how it's able to serve the music, to advance the drama, rather than in any possible independent literary value, that is very limited anyway in almost every case.

There are many ways to write a succesful libretto. Lately, we have had even the example of the one for _Doctor Atomic_, made just by putting together a lot of different texts: poetry, official documents, scientific paragraphs,..

Personally I love Felice Romani's librettos, because I think they are the perfect examples of how the poetry is set to inspire the music (and the drama, in the best of them). Particularly, of course, his work for Bellini, and especially this unique masterpiece they weaved together, _Norma._


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## Bardamu (Dec 12, 2011)

Yeah, Romani is probably my favorite too.

I admire Boito's Nerone libretto, the work of a life.
Also really appreciate Dallapiccola librettos he wrote for his operas.


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## schigolch (Jun 26, 2011)

Of course, Amin Maalouf is not primarily known as a librettist, but as one of the foremost writers today in French. I guess many members and readers will be familiar with _Samarcande_ or _Le Rocher de Tanios_ (The Rock of Tanios).

But he is also a librettist, and a good one for that matter. So far, he has only worked with the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, but together they have already produced four operas, the first one being the masterpiece _L'amour de loin_ (Love from Afar), about the trobadour Jaufré Rudel and his love for a Christian lady living in the Holy Land, at the times of the Crusades.


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## schigolch (Jun 26, 2011)




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## schigolch (Jun 26, 2011)

Philippe Quinault was a rather mediocre French playwright when he met Lully. Impressed by the Florentine composer, Quinault decided to work exclusively as a librettist moving forward. He wrote the following Tragédies Lyriques:

Cadmus et Hermione (1673)
Alceste (1674)
Thésée (1675)
Atys (1676)
Isis (1677)
Proserpine (1680)
Persée (1682)
Phaëton (1683)
Amadis (1684)
Roland (1685)
Armide (1686)

These are the core of Lully's operatic work, and arguably one of the earliest peaks of the genre. Quinault's verses were not memorable by themselves, but were very well adapted to the music and so, together, were really impressive art. That was exactly what a libretto should be written for.

Let's watch the first one, _Cadmus et Hermione_, in a version presented by Le Poème Harmonique:


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