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Studies in Comparative Literature 74
Series Editors
C.C. Barfoot and Theo D’haen
“Music’s Obedient Daughter”
The Opera Libretto from Source to Score
Edited by Sabine Lichtenstein
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2014
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CONTENTS
Sabine Lichtenstein
Introduction 1
Eddie Vetter
The Power of Music:
Striggio and Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo 11
Jacques Boogaart
Octavia Reincarnated:
Busenello’s and Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea 37
Tim Carter
In the Operatic Workshop:
The Case of Varesco’s and Mozart’s Idomeneo 69
Caryl Clark
The Librettist’s Dilemma in London:
Badini’s and Haydn’s Orfeo ed Euridice 107
Irmlind Capelle
“But There Is another Intrigue and a Comic Element Placed
Alongside”:
Hans Sachs – the Relation of Lortzing’s Opera to Deinhardstein’s
Drama 131
Heather Hadlock
“Ce bal est original!”:
Classical Parody and Burlesque in Orphée aux enfers by Crémieux,
Halévy and Offenbach 155
John Neubauer
Burning the Heretics and Saving Don Carlos:
Méry’s, Du Locle’s and Verdi’s Don Carlos 185
Katherine Syer
Tracing Wotan’s Incendiary Past:
The Evolution of Storms and Fire in Wagner’s
Der Ring des Nibelungen 215
Vincent Giroud
Manon at the Opera:
From Prévost’s Manon Lescaut to Auber’s Manon Lescaut and
Massenet’s Manon 239
Kasper van Kooten
“Closed, Efficient, Terrible!”:
Reflections on the Genesis and Dramaturgy of Illica’s, Giacosa’s
and Puccini’s Madama Butterfly 269
Helga Hushahn
The End of a Line:
Strauss’ and Hofmannsthal’s Elektra 297
Sabine Lichtenstein
“Something Uncommonly German”:
Hans Pfitzner’s Palestrina, Eine Musikalische Legende 325
Loes Dommering-van Rongen
The Musical Personality of Don Quixote:
Manuel de Falla’s El Retablo de Maese Pedro 359
Michal Grover-Friedlander
Transformations of the Killing of a Boy:
Weill’s and Brecht’s Der Jasager 381
Ruth HaCohen
A Theological Midrash in Search of Operatic Action:
Moses und Aron by Arnold Schoenberg 405
C.C. Barfoot
The Making of a Victim:
From Crabbe’s The Borough to Slater’s and Britten’s
Peter Grimes 433
Claudia di Luzio
Opera on Opera:
Luciano Berio’s Opera 463
Notes on Contributors 483
Index 489
INTRODUCTION
SABINE LICHTENSTEIN
In 2009, I was asked to put together a volume of essays on opera
librettos. Since the volume was supposed to appear in a comparative-
literature series, I thought it should not offer a historical overview or a
theoretical approach, as is the case with Patrick J. Smith’s The Tenth
Muse or Albert Gier’s Das Libretto: Theorie und Geschichte einer
musikoliterarischen Gattung. The context within which the book was
to appear asked for an approach through practical examples and
discussions about a libretto’s attributes and what is expected of a
librettist mainly in response to the demand of its particular
characteristics. The volume should clarify the fundamental differences
between the libretto and other literary genres. For the history of the
opera has negated the principle “prima le parole e poi la musica”.1
However complex the history of libretto may be, however many
twists and turns of argument there may have been, and however
different the relation between word and music may be in the case of
each work, operas are increasingly received in the arts and in
scholarship as a musical genre: Anna Bolena, The Bartered Bride,
Oedipus Rex are regarded as works by Donizetti, Smetana, and
Stravinsky, rather than by Felice Romani, Karel Sabina, and Jean
Cocteau. With few exceptions, they are the subjects of musicological
studies. In concert halls and through the media we hear instrumental
versions made from sung or unsung opera numbers, but no recited
libretto texts without music. In a genetic-chronological sense, the
principle “prima le parole” may still have had validity in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when librettos were often
recycled; but after 1800, this was seldom the case. From then on,
1 The precept is a variation on the title of Antonio Salieri one-Act opera Prima la
musica e poi le parole (1786).
2 The Opera Libretto from Source to Score
libretto and music were usually written at the same time, and in some
cases the music, or segments of it, even preceded the text.2
Britten’s Peter Grimes, as C.C. Barfoot indicates in this volume, is
just one of the many examples where the creation of the text often fell
behind the composition of the music. In vocal genres, certainly in
songs and opera arias, the text aesthetically almost always takes a
subordinate role because the words are often not clearly understood
but also as it were deconstructed or transcended. As a result, nobody is
disturbed by the prosodic incorrectness at the beginning of the famous
“La donna è mobile” in Verdi’s Rigoletto: the metric accent falls on
“La”, and although many can join in singing the melody, almost all of
them lack the precise knowledge of, and even an interest in, the text.
However, the most important criterion in this context is neither what
came first – the words or the music – nor the perception or the
aesthetic deconstruction of the word, but the actual procedure during
the making of the work. The manner in which operas are created
indicates that Mozart’s famous dictum from 1781 that poetry is
“music’s obedient daughter”,3 more correctly reflects the relation
between text and music than the early-seventeenth-century idea that
music is the “serva” and the word must be the “padrone”.4
As Tim Carter’s article on Idomeneo shows, Mozart’s dictum
needs to be refined, also in the case of his own work. Though also the
texts of recitatives, even spoken texts, adjust to the medium of music,
in recitatives especially, music follows linguistic accents. In spoken
texts, music is even more obedient: it is altogether silent.5 A man like
Pietro Metastasio, whose librettos were used by composers repeatedly,
did not see himself as an obedient daughter. However, at the end of
the eighteenth century Metastasio’s time was over. From then on the
wishes of the composer determined to large extent the form of the
text. It was not the librettist who asked the composer to change the
music, but the composer who explained to the poet what he needed.
2 Salieri’s title also refers to the order in which the components were written. Lacking
inspiration, a librettist is trying here to accommodate himself to already composed
music, deviating thus from the general practice.
3 See the bibliographic data in the article on Idomeneo in this volume.
4 Claudio Monteverdi, Scherzi Musicali, Preface (1607). See n.40 in the article on
L’Orfeo in this volume.
5 The melodrama, exclusively defined by music-supported spoken texts, could stay
alive in the long term only as a cherished technique especially for hair-raising
moments, but not as a genre.
Introduction 3
Bellini, for instance, is known to have given exact instructions to his
librettists concerning metre, sometimes from scene to scene and figure
to figure. Resistance from poets led ever more frequently to tensions
between them and the composers. These were often the result of
different interpretations of the source, and even more frequently, a
clash between the composer’s musico-dramatic demands and the
librettist’s poetic concerns.6
Kasper van Kooten quotes in his article Giuseppe Giacosa’s
remark that as the poet of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly he had
“entirely sacrificed himself”. Giacosa spoke on behalf of many: he,
and Montagu Slater (the librettist of Peter Grimes), and Giovanni B.
Varesco (the librettist of Idomeneo), are just three of the many
librettists who responded to (and relieved) their literary frustrations
with separate editions of their texts that dropped all the changes forced
on them by the composer. Giacosa and many of his colleagues thought
that a libretto ought to be a literary work which could function
independently, though Bellini had almost seventy years earlier told
Carlo Pepoli, the librettist of I Puritani, that this assumption was a
serious mistake. His words, as far as I know the only aesthetic credo
that Bellini uttered, became well known:
Should my music be beautiful and please [people] you could write a
million letters against the composers’ abuse of poetry etc., but then
you have not proven anything .… Carve into your mind in solid stone
letters: the music drama must bring people to cry, shiver, and die
through the singing …. And do you know why I have said that a good
drama lacks healthy reason? Because I know well what an intractable
animal a literary man is ….7
As a bel canto composer, Bellini in this remark may have
overemphasized singing, but he was not the only one in the late
eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries who asserted that musical
drama was not about healthy reason. In 1771 Charles Burney
complained about “Marcello’s famous cantata called Cassandra,
where this composer has entirely sacrificed the music to the poetry, by
changing the time or style of his movement at every new idea which
6 The tensions are mirrored in Richard Strauss’ one-Act Capriccio (1942), which, like
Salieri’s Prima la musica, is a meta-opera.
7 Bellini to Carlo Pepoli, May 1834, in Bellini Epistolario, ed. Maria Luisa Cambi,
Milan, 1943, 400.
