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The Libretto
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DEFINITION
A libretto (literally a “little book”) is the
text of an opera, oratorio, or musical drama, generally containing a
synopsis of scenes, cast list, stage directions, and poetic lines to be sung
or versi virgolati (unsung text) to be performed. It may be original,
but it’s usually based upon drama (ballets or plays), literary fiction
(short stories or novels), or poetry (mostly extended cycles). The libretti
resulting from adaptations are highly condensed, emotionally exaggerated
versions of the originals, allowing for further enhancement of themes
through musical settings of the text by a composer. A libretto is written
with enhancement in mind; it is not a “completed” form of art since all
finalizations of its content are not possible until music and stagecraft
have been added which embellish the most emotionally and visually evocative
moments of the text.
There are roughly six sub-genres of the libretto: the
Broadway opera libretto (or “poperetta” libretto), the musical comedy
libretto, the musical drama libretto, the opera libretto (itself divided
into ballad opera, opera seria, opera buffa, and grand opera), the operetta
libretto (“new” and “traditional” mini-operas), the play-with-music
libretto, and the revue libretto. The play-with-music libretto and the revue
libretto are contrary extremes, the former being a verse play not intended
to be sung and the latter being a series of songs with no plot (the idea is
to link tunes loosely by emotion rather than strictly by narrative). Musical
comedy and musical drama libretti are story-bound scripts which use short,
choppy rhythmic speech or elongated vowel constructions with frequent
extended pauses to conjure their respective emotions (humor and intensity);
they feature prose dialogue alternating with verse arias.
The opera libretto is a narrative-heavy text that is meant to be sung in
its entirety, featuring recitative (dialogue to be sung between arias) and
an exploration of the “grand” emotions (e.g., love, hate, jealousy, loyalty,
etc.); the contemporary answer to the opera libretto is the Broadway opera
libretto, which uses contemporary diction and rock-and-roll rhythms to evoke
its emotions rather than the traditional verse forms of most opera libretti.
Less common now than in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is the
operetta (literally “little opera”) libretto, dealing with highly convoluted
plots featuring exotic locales, hyperbolic characters, and excessive
sentimentality in tightly-controlled verse; it is the precursor to musical
comedy/drama libretti in that it uses prose dialogue between arias, but its
language is always arch. The operetta libretto sub-genre, however, has been
recently transformed into a form termed “new” operetta in which characters
are three-dimensional and the element of exoticism stems from psychological
investigation into character psyches rather than foreign cultures. “New”
operetta libretti also prefer to deal with the here-and-now, favoring
contemporary social concerns and using vernacular speech.
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LIBRETTO AS ART (WITH BRIEF HISTORY)
The libretto, with its purposefully simple plots, roundish-but-not-rounded
characters, and serviceable rather than lyric verse, is often snubbed in
favor of more readily dynamic genres of writing. The customary argument
against the form reasons that since a libretto must depend upon a composer
and stage technicians to realize its artistic vision, it is creatively weak;
true written art requires no bolster from other creative mediums to lend it
viability (the term “creative mediums” here excludes the more clinical
involvement of agents, editors, marketers, and publishers). However, this
reasoned disregard for the libretto makes the mistake of judging the text as
a single-creator work (as novels, stories, poems, and plays are generally
regarded) when it is really a multi-perspective, collaborative effort.
Certainly, the libretto did not begin its career laboring beneath the onus
of marginalization. The craft of libretto-writing may be traced back to the
Greek festivals (particularly those of Dionysus) in which actors in plays
delivered dactylic hexameter lines in a declamatory monodic fashion which
was written by playwrights to align with the accompaniment of flutes and
strings. The music was designed to embellish the poetry of a script, and
those words which evoked the best emotions were showcased with florid
musical ornamentation to lend them even greater emphasis. The melodic flow
of speech and its potential for scoring was as much a concern for the
scriptwriter as was his use of theatrical conventions. Indeed, Greek
audiences expected interwoven song and speech.
The Romans downplayed libretti in favor of more decadent and violent plays,
and the practice of writing non-liturgical dramatic texts to be sung for
entertainment purposes was lost during the Middle Ages, but a small group of
Florentines took it upon themselves to revive the discipline. In 1587, the
Florentine Camerata was born under the leadership of Count Giovanni de’Bardi;
its purpose was to create and perform libretti after the Greek fashion.
Public response to their offerings was overwhelming, sparking the birth of
Italian opera, and the scores created for the new libretti (catchy and
upbeat) captured the emotional themes of the texts far more simply than the
ornate verse which had first been used to conjure said moods. By the time of
Rossini, the words of texts-to-be-sung had become subordinate to their
evocative settings, and musical theatre patrons enjoined composers to
produce ever more ornate and uplifting orchestrations.
The trend toward placing words beneath music continued well into the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with composers claiming primacy in the
creation of musical dramas as their librettists toiled in obscurity to
produce lines of verse on demand which might satisfy their composers’
musical insights into the dramatic subtexts of carefully-chosen plots.
Critical attitudes reinforced this promulgation of unequal partnerships by
lauding music as the irrefutable bastion for musical drama, capable of
stirring the emotions far more quickly and deeply than mere wordplay.
It would seem that, as popular philosophy would have it, a collaboration
between two or more disparate mediums results in one medium dominating the
other; in this case, music apparently overwhelms the libretto. Yet a closer
examination reveals that musical supremacy pertaining to sung theatre is
really only wishful thinking on the part of music critics. The librettist
didn’t collapse when the public shouted for melody – he adapted. The growing
popularity of music over words forced him to rely upon his dramaturgic
ability more than his versification skills in order to make a more effective
contribution to the shows he created. Verse became simple, concise, and
narrative, designed to ease along the pacing of a well-reasoned plot which
featured ample opportunities for spectacle.
Librettists developed texts which were more streamlined and stageworthy,
granting their composers more dramatic space upon which to impose scoring
and more material from which to take inspiration. Consider Patrick J.
Smith’s definition of a librettist:
[He is] an artist who, by dint of his professional training as a poet and/or
dramatist, can often visualize the work [at hand] as a totality more
accurately than the composer. This totality includes not only the ‘story’
but also the means by which the story will be most effectively presented on
stage both organizationally and scenically.
Story sensibility and stagecraft have taken the place of excessive poetic
declamation in the librettist’s toolkit, and he has acquired a stronger
role in the composer-librettist partnership dynamic as a result. If
composers continue to overshadow their wordsmiths, it’s only because they
are generally more recognizable individually in terms of historical
influence (many writing separate melodies, suites, and symphonies which
reach an audience far larger than the theatre-going crowd) while librettists
work best in the background as shapers and guiders of dramatic ideas.
To illustrate the power that a librettist has in crafting the form of a
show, the
differences between La Favola d’Orfeo (1607) and Orfeo ed Eyridice (1762)
should be explained. Both shows recount the tragedy of Orpheus, but their
libretti cause them to develop along highly different paths. In La Favola
d’Orfeo, Alessandro Striggio provides composer Claudio Monteverdi with an
impulsive but dispassionate Orpheus, resulting in a text with few flights of
fancy and multiple incidences of commentary which the composer sets as
ever-flowing and intensifying recitative that ultimately explodes into
vibrant nothingness in the moment Orpheus completes his fruitless quest.
Ranieri di Calzabigi’s Orfeo ed Eyridice for Christoph Willibald von Gluck,
however, features a less impulsive and more emotional Orpheus who vents his
feelings freely through sweeping arias richly set by Gluck; the hero is even
carried away on strains of majestic music when the piece closes.
Modern librettists have yet another component with which to create their
libretti – the psychological archetype. For an explanation of why this
should be so, one must turn to the words of noted librettist and scholar
Robertson Davies:
Jung’s collective unconscious deals with the idea that genetically- derived
instincts respond to specific sensory stimuli in predictable patterns across
the breadth of humanity. Certain sights, smells, sounds, tastes, and tactile
sensations evoke the same or similar understandings for all persons. These
evocative sensations are known as archetypes, and they are the staple of the
libretto. What is experienced in the [musical] theatre is an appeal to basic
human nature as derived from biological evolution.
Of course, the idea of the collective unconscious being a component of
humanity’s biological evolution is still unproven to science’s satisfaction
(indeed, it has been called a purely cultural phenomenon), but Davies’
connection of the two provides a useful rubric to follow when considering
artistic creation. The libretto evokes emotions through verse, story, and
stagecraft which reference myth and archetype in order to cater to the
primal understandings of mankind. As W. H. Auden notes, the show evoked by a
libretto makes the province of the supernatural the province of the human,
portraying the realm of the unconscious onstage so that its passions may be
felt and examined offstage.
The art of the libretto is the art of the incomplete shape; it is a performative
vessel waiting to be filled by music and mechanics. A librettist must write
lyrical narrative lines which resonate with potential music, heavy with open
vowels and loaded with repetitions of emotional context; he must develop a
layered but straightforward story with archetypal resonance that may be
realized through his understanding of stagecraft; he must telegraph all
character motivations in order to transform subjectivity into a palatable
form of understanding for an audience. The result is a slender volume
(usually less than one hundred pages in length) which explodes into raw
vitality when presented upon a stage. It is this transformative quality of
the libretto which has attracted the attention of such modern-day creative
writers as Truman Capote (House of Flowers), Dana Gioia (Nosferatu), and
Joyce Carol Oates (Black Water).
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NAMES TO KNOW (ABRIDGED)
Twenty-First Century Librettists
Dana Gioia
Greg Kotis
Terrence McNally
Richard Nelson
William Wenthe
Twentieth-Century Librettists
W. H. Auden
Henri Cain
Truman Capote
Gustave Charpentier
Dana Gioia
Chester Kallman
Maurice Maeterlinck
Joyce Carol Oates
Sergei Prokofiev
Gertrude Stein
Richard Strauss
Hugo Von Hofmannsthal
Nineteenth-Century Librettists
Arrigo Boito
Alexandre Porfyrevich Borodin
Salvatore Cammarano
W. S. Gilbert
Luigi Illica
Ruggiero Leoncavallo
Henri Meilhac
Modeste Petrovich Moussorgsky
Felice Romani
Augustin Eugene Scribe
Richard Wagner
Eighteenth-Century Librettists
William Congreve
Lorenzo Da Ponte
Ranieri Di Calzabigi
John Gay
Emmanuel Schikaneder
Seventeenth-Century Librettists
Francesco Busenello
Alessandro Striggio
Nahum Tate
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