Two Bibliographies
- Libretto writing
- Opera in English
© 2009 David Scott Marley
This is a work in progress. It began with a desire to revisit the books that had once been very important in my development as a writer, to see which ones held up from my older and hopefully wise perspective. I hope I'll be adding more entries now and then.
Books on Libretto Writing
I'm not going to bother to separate discussions of opera librettos from discussions of musical theater librettos; the two have far more in common than not anyway.
Engel, Lehman, Words with Music (Macmillan 1972). This is the best book I know of on writing librettos. I was a student of Lehman Engel for a short while near the end of his life, and I still think he's the best writing teacher I've ever had. The book is focused more on musical theater than opera, but Engel wrote about both, and a lot of what he said is applicable to both genres. And where it isn't, he often gives specific reasons why the two forms are different.
This is an opinionated and outspoken book. Engel is not shy about saying what he thinks, which occasionally bothers me when I think he's barking up the wrong tree or expounding an idiosyncratic opinion. But far more often his outspokenness is precisely what makes the book so valuable.
There are some drawbacks: Engel was a musical director, not a writer himself, so what he wrote is the result of years of observing the writing of others in performance but not of going through the process of writing himself. That gave him a particular slant -- he didn't write much about the nuts and bolts of it, but on the other hand he knew well the difference between what actually works before a live audience and what merely reads well on paper. And the fact that he was a musician and not a writer means that his own writing isn't always elegant.
Also, some of what he wrote has become less applicable than it used to be as fashions in musical theater have changed; sometimes what he lays down as a general principle looks a little restrictive nowadays, what with audiences having become more open to grittier subject matter and more unorthodox ways of structuring a story than they used to be. But in his classes, Engel always emphasized that there were no hard and fast rules, only principles, and that principles can always be broken if you adequately understand, first, why they've become principles, and, second, why it's better to break them in this particular case. He felt he was looking at what has worked and not worked in the past, not to extract any kind of doctrine, but just in hopes of avoiding some common problems in the future.
Engel was a rambler. The book is organized into chapters -- "Characters", "Subject Matter", "The Outer Shape", etc. -- but within each chapter he wanders off the ostensible subject a lot. Everything he has to say is interesting, and most of it is useful, but it doesn't always have much to do with the title of the chapter! The chapter on "Comedy and Entertainment", for example, starts off making some good points about what various segments of the audience are going to find "entertaining", then wanders off into thoughts on Götterdämmerung, Man of La Mancha, and the inadequacies of theater critics. It's all interesting reading, but takes some sorting out.
For all its eccentricities, this is still a truly great book, and it contains far more sound, practical, usable advice on writing librettos than any other I've read. Engel wrote with great insight, experience, and wisdom about so many aspects of the subject: what he believed to be the essential elements of a libretto, how the structure of a libretto differs from that of a play, the process of adapting a story from another genre, the differences between grand opera and musical theater, the reasons for the failure of this or that musical, the viability of plotless structure (what we'd now call "nonlinear narrative") in librettos, and much, much more.
Excerpts:
The uses of a subplot are numerous, especialy in a musical. Since -- due to restricted length of a libretto and desirable simplicity because of musical use and unavoidable interference -- the principal plot must be succinct and as uncomplex as possible, still maintaining substantial interest and conflict, the addition of another concurrent plot involving other characters is advantageous. Besides, it relieves the performers by not making them always necessarily present, and the audience is refreshed by changes of people and interest in another dramatic line.
(That's a very awkwardly worded passage, but there in a few sentences is stated a very important basic idea about structuring a musical theater libretto. As he says later in the chapter, this is sometimes less applicable to grand opera, and he gives some good reasons why this is.
My observation and my personal experience have convinced me that, as a rule of thumb, a one-act musical or opera will generally work best without a subplot, and that a piece in two or more acts is vastly easier to make work with a subplot. Though it's been done, I would be leery of trying to do it myself, unless I was very confident that my story was especially strong, my words and the composer's music were both in top form, and the central role (or roles, but it's most often just one, and most often a woman) was going to be played by a performer who was not only good enough and versatile enough to keep an audience engaged the whole evening by herself, but who also had the stamina of at least one ox.)
Nobody would dream of trying to build a bridge or fly a plane without first having had a considerable amount of study and experience. This is due to a matter of personal safety that is of major concern. However, there is no village in the United States in which there is not at least one person dreaming the impossible dream, who does not write a complete musical libretto that is most often replete with tunes and lyric copyrights. These "shows" are then dispatched in envelopes covered with postage stamps to people like me. ... I stopped reading the unsolicited ones when I began perusing the cast of characters in one script, the first of whom was "George Sand -- a lady writer."
I would like at the outset to clarify my point of view regarding two things: 1) Any words at all, including the multiplication table, the alphabet, and the Manhattan telephone directory, can be set to music. 2) There is nothing wrong with the English language used in song if it is used knowledgeably.
The question that arises from the first proposition is simply: What is to be gained by setting the Manhattan telephone directory to music? Composers should ask themselves the same question about the shows they write and the lyrics they set.
The second statement is less important here except as a point of view, since there is a widespread misapprehension that any language other than English is better suited to singing. This attitude has usually been the result of careless translations or bad composers who refuse to take into proper account the rich sounds and special cadences our language has. We have to think more about melody, accent, cadence, and especially vowel and consonant effects than Europeans because we are newer in this field and preferable uses of our language have been less explored.
Something needs to be said about House of Flowers on two accounts. First, its composer, Harold Arlen, writes attractive, distinctive, and often memorable songs. They have invariably been anchored to unworkable librettos. Second, because the songs in House of Flowers were remembered fondly after the initial production of the show, there was a somewhat general and unusual insistence that this or that, or he or she, in the original production had ruined an otherwise marvelous show, and so it had its second chance more recently in an off-Broadway revival.
The book by Truman Capote could not have been more ruined by anybody than by its author, who demonstrated beyond any possible doubt that he knew nothing about the requirements of a libretto.
Strauss, Richard, and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, The Correspondence between Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal (Cambridge University Press 1961). It's fascinating to watch these two brilliant (but temperamental, each in his own way) artists hammering out their works together. The correspondence is a mixed bag, sometimes getting into the technical nuts-and-bolts stuff of constructing and writing an opera (which I'm fascinated by) and sometimes the practical business of getting the productions mounted to their satisfaction. And an endless dance of perceived slights, indignant responses, and profuse apologies and assurances. Some of my favorite operas came out of this collaboration.
Excerpts:
Don't forget that the audience should also laugh! Laugh, not just smile or grin! I still miss in our work a genuinely comical situation: everything is merely amusing, but not comic! (R.S.)
(This is from the early stages of work on Der Rosenkavalier. Strauss just tosses it off in a footnote, but this is an important principle: A comedy needs to make the audience laugh out loud, at least every once in a while, and that's true of all live comedy, from the lowest farce to the subtlest and most sophisticated comedy of manners. This isn't so critical in books or movies, which are more often experienced alone or in a smaller group -- under those conditions, a subtle comedy that makes you smile and grin but never laugh out loud can be wonderful. But in a live theater, where you're trying to create a common experience among an audience made up of several hundred different people with several hundred different temperaments -- not to mention living performers who will work far better with some audible feedback -- you can't achieve that wonderful collective experience without some real out-loud laughter.)
The public is never altogether wrong. (H.v.H.)
(Lehman Engel used to quote this a lot.)
[On his decision to write the Composer in Ariadne auf Naxos as a trouser part for a mezzo:] A tenor is impossible, if only because I can't get the primo tenore even for Bacchus because he would cost the management too much, and the part would be too small for him, and the two buffos are already booked for Brighella and Truffaldin.
A leading baritone won't sing the Composer: so what is left to me except the only genre of singer not yet represented in Ariadne, my Rofrano [the mezzo-soprano trouser role in Rosenkavalier], for whom an intelligent female singer is available anywhere ... As a rule she is the most talented woman singer in the theater, who will look forward to the little cabinet part and will make something of it -- so what does it matter if, in the end, the effect is a little more masculine or a little more delicate? ... Surely we don't want to do something again that'll be wrecked by casting difficulties or bungled by second-rate and third-rate singers. Don't forget that the best singers aren't available for the operas of living German composers, or only in exceptional cases, but are kept for Verdi, Meyerbeer, and Flotow! (R.S.)
Books on Opera in English
Crozier, Eric, ed., Opera in English (Bodley Head 1946). A slim collection of five brief essays on various aspects of performing opera in English:
- Introduction (Tyrone Guthrie)
- Sadler's Wells Opera (Edwin Evans)
- An Experiment in Opera (Joan Cross)
- The Future of British Opera (Edward J. Dent)
- The Place of Ballet in Opera (Ninette de Valois)
Excerpts:
The result has been that in this country operatic art is nearly always judged by the queerest standards. Opera is drama set to music: the dramatic element should be, and in the standard works is, the complement of the music -- the one illuminates the other, and one without the other is a lamp without a battery. Yet it is a common thing in this country to hear persons of taste and education declare that they prefer to hear opera sung in a language they cannot understand; or that they love to go to the opera but always sit with their eyes shut. ... Yet, if a work is given in a foreign language, it is reasonable enough to swing the emphasis off the unintelligible drama on to purely musical values. (T.G.)
Opera, no less than ballet, should be the product of a similar collaboration of music, drama, and scenic art. But at all times and in all countries the dramatic illusion, which is the goal of theatrecraft, has constantly been allowed to suffer frustration from the direcion being in the hands of musicians who thought first, and often exclusively, of their own art. Thus the ear might, under favourable conditions, be satisfied, but rarely the eye, which was constantly confronted with insufficiencies, and even incongruities, destructive of the dramatic illusion. This has happened so often that not only singers, but hitherto even audiences, have been led to regard it as a normal feature of the operatic conventions. The consequent neglect of theatrical plausibility is the basic cause of the objections most frequently raised by those who profess to regard opera as an art in decay. (E.E.)
Is it really necessary for me at the present day to defend English as a language for opera? We must take the inherent beauty of English for granted. We regard ourselves as a nation of poets; there has never been a single period of English history, from Langland onwards, without great English poetry. We have good reason, too, to be proud of our national contribution to the theatre; and we have been a nation of singers ever since Pope Gregory heard the English boys singing in the slave-market of Rome.
Opera in English is often condemned as absurd, but only by English people whose ideas of opera are based on Verdi and the other Italians of his century. With the old-fashioned devotees of Italian opera there is no argument possible. They will rave about the incomparable beauty of the Italian language, but not one of them has ever read through an Italian libretto -- much less taken the trouble to translate it for singing. There is a fixed idea that all opera stories are absurd, and all librettos nonsense and doggerel. The less one knows about the story, the less one hears the words, the greater is one's enjoyment of the opera. (E.D.)
Dent, Edward J., Opera (Penguin 1940). Unusual and interesting for its emphasis on the development of opera in England. Also interesting for a brief discussion -- a few pages near the end of the book -- on performing opera in English.
Excerpts:
Both [English voices and the English language] are predominantly light and agile in character; they are admirably suited to old-fashioned comic opera like that of Mozart, Rossini, and Auber. They will sound equally well in Faust and Carmen; in the heavier Italian operas such as Aïda and Otello we must simply accept a vocally lighter interpretation all round than Italians would give. Falstaff is admirably suited to an English company, indeed perhaps better than to Italians, who do not much enjoy ensemble singing.
These suggestions will not meet with the approval of the perfectionists who profess such exalted standards that they cannot bear to listen to any opera except in its original language. ... I should have more respect for the perfectionists if they really lived up to their creed; but whereas a Welsh accent in an English opera will set their teeth on edge, they will accept the thickest German accent in an Italian opera without noticing it in the least. As long as the conductor and principals have foreign names and the performance is not in English, that is generally enough for them.
Opera is drama, a thing done, acted, and seen; and history shows that whenever music has sought to tyrannize completely over drama it has been the ruin of opera.
Hammerstein II, Oscar, Introduction to Carmen Jones (published libretto, Knopf 1945). This is a short, plainspoken essay, and great fun to read.
Excerpts:
I sat back in the well-cushioned orchestra chair -- Grandpa built beautiful opera houses -- and I found myself enjoying the lovely music coming up from the orchestra pit. But I was puzzled and disturbed by the accompanying action on the stage. Sometimes the fat lady would look very sad, and there was no way of knowing why. Sometimes she laughed, but I wouldn't know what the joke was and I wished I did. It then seemed quite clear to me why Grandpa lost money on opera. Listening to people sing words you didn't understand wasn't much fun. That's what I thought then. That's what I think now.
The sad fact is that when you hear opera in English it is in pretty bad English. These great works, originally written by distinguished dramatic poets, are translated by scholarly but untalented gentlemen who know nearly nothing about the science of writing phonetic, singable lyrics. They are not poets, nor dramatists, nor showmen. A good adaptation of an opera requires a librettist who is all of these.
Porter, Andrew, Introduction to The Ring of the Nibelung (W.W. Norton 1977). This is Porter's introduction to his published English-language adaptation of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen. Lots of good stuff in it. It's scholarly, sensible, and very funny about the difficulties of adapting Wagner into singable English. I don't agree with everything he says, but with most of it seems dead on target to me.
Excerpts:
All translation is a matter of weighing gains and losses. The Ring -- despite what some German critics of Wagner's verse may feel -- is not one of the works of which it can be said, as it was of James Fenimore Cooper's novels, that they have been "often translated, never without improvement". In the lyric theater, the gains are in verbal and dramatic communicativeness. (Has there ever been a great composer who did not prefer his works to be performed in the language of the country?) The losses are of that other "sense" conveyed by the sound and the untranslatable subtleties of the original words. And the translator's task is to make such losses as light as possible.
(I would add here that part of the translator's work may also be to look for places where he can touch up the colors himself, to compensate for what must be lost in translation and to keep the result from feeling bland and washed out. If a line doesn't translate well, it may be better to substitute a differently colored turn of phrase, even if the precise meaning is altered, than to settle for something that better approximates the original meaning but is stilted and hard to grasp in the theater. For live performance, it's more important to convey the spirit and fluidity of the original work than to be accurate about every word, or even every line. This is why an adapter of opera needs to be something of a dramatic poet as well: There will inevitably be many, many places where the poetry in the original cannot be translated precisely and yet fit well on the notes, and the writer needs to understand how to produce some good dramatic poetry of his or her own that will fill in the rough patches and blend seamlessly in the whole.)
[In a list of his goals in this adaptation:] To provide a translation that is close to the original and at the same time makes audible sense at first hearing, without needing to be "worked out" by a puzzled listener. Towards the close of The Rhinegold, Fricka, hearing the name Walhall for the first time, asks what it means. The Corders' Wotan replied: "What might 'gainst our fears my mind may have found, if proved a success, soon shall explain that name." And Forman's: "What, in might over fear, my manfulness found, shall matchlessly live and lead the meaning to light." Both are fair representations of some tortuous German. But I felt that unless the meaning could be led to light a little more directly than that, the speech might as well be left in German. So, natural words in a natural order.