Read on to discover why we don't credit great opera librettists...
Who wrote Oklahoma! and South Pacific? Go on, be brave and put your hand up. It’s not a trick question. The answer is Rodgers and Hammerstein, right? And who wrote The Mikado and The Pirates of Penzance? Right again. It was Gilbert and Sullivan. This is an easy quiz, isn’t it?
Let’s try one more question. Who wrote Peter Grimes? Sorry, what did you say? Benjamin Britten? I’m afraid I can only give you half a mark. If you answered ‘Rodgers and Hammerstein’ to the first question and ‘Gilbert and Sullivan’ to the second, logic (and fair play) dictates that your answer to the third should have been Britten and Slater. Or even Slater and Britten.
Theatre lyricists and opera librettists... why credit one and not the other?
At which point you may have some questions for me, along the lines of ‘Slater? Who is he or she?’ And that brings us to the real question I want to ask. Which is this. Why, when we talk about musicals, do we nearly always refer to the writer of the words as well as the composer of the tunes, whereas when we talk about operas, we credit only the composer?
Posterity often consigns the librettist’s name to semi-oblivion, as with poor old Montagu Slater, the librettist of Peter Grimes, who really deserved better. The novelist Anthony Burgess observed that Slater’s Grimes text was ‘the only libretto I know that can be read in its own right as a dramatic poem’, and he’s right.
Even the best-known and most talented librettists don't get their due credit
Perhaps there are special reasons for Slater’s subsequent obscurity. Britten wasn’t exactly loyal to his librettists. In fact, he usually dumped them after one collaboration, as if determined not to get tied into a long partnership. Some of them ended up loathing Britten in return. Ronald Duncan, the librettist of The Rape of Lucretia, described Britten in his autobiography as ‘a sadist, psychologically crippled and bent’.
But even famous, brilliant opera librettists – the likes of Da Ponte for Mozart, Boito for Verdi, Hofmannsthal for Strauss – never seem to get their names above the title, as they say in Hollywood. Opera composers tend to call the shots in the creative process and then steal the lion’s share of the limelight for as long as the work is performed.
When composers think they can write librettos... with disastrous results
It seems to me that this imbalance of power and prestige has had unfortunate consequences for opera as an artform. First, it has tempted some composers to write their own librettos, imagining they can do it better than people who write words for a living. The results usually vary from ‘could do with some editing’ (most of Wagner) to ‘hilariously pretentious’ (all of Tippett).
Other composers decide to adapt famous spoken dramas, thinking that just because a play works as a play, it will automatically work as an opera. But often it doesn’t. Shakespeare’s plays, in particular, rarely work as operas. According to those who count such things, there are nearly 50 operas based on The Tempest alone. Can you remember a single one of them? Admittedly, Verdi did the Bard full justice with his Otello and Falstaff. But he had a secret weapon. He used a great librettist, Boito, to reshape the material.
The best operas... an equal partnership, and credit, between composers and librettists
When you think of the 20th- and 21st-century operas that really work, dramatically and musically, you discover that their librettos were nearly always penned by classy writers who were on an equal footing, creatively, with their composers. Think of WH Auden’s contribution to Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, or how Alice Goodman turned contemporary news items into compelling librettos for John Adams’s Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer. Or, in the UK, how George Benjamin’s partnership with the playwright Martin Crimp has produced a string of fine operas including the thrilling Written on Skin.
Of course, not all top writers wish to suffer the frustration of witnessing their carefully crafted words rendered indecipherable by a soprano who has been coached to produce only vowel sounds, and even to be selective with those. But nowadays at least surtitles can reveal exactly what the librettist wrote. So, a telling turn of phrase can have just as much impact as a memorable tune or a striking harmonic progression from the composer.
Why more great writers should turn their hands to librettos
Which is exactly as it should be. Opera was invented in 17th-century Italy specifically to give words and music equal weight. So, let’s encourage more of our best novelists, poets, even journalists, to try their hand at writing librettos. And if they produce a good one, let’s make sure they also get their names in lights.
