Literary Libretti

During this last century, established poets have written libretti, or parts of them, with mixed success. Deems Taylor's 1927 The King's Henchman, specially commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera, has a Tristan und Isolde-like story written in mock 11th-century archaic English by none other than Edna St. Vincent Millay, who certainly did not employ that style in her own Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry. Langston Hughes (novelist as well as poet) wrote the libretto for Weill's 1946 Street Scene where he captured the sidewalk vernacular of a tenement neighborhood of New York; and co-wrote another, with Verna Arvy (Still's wife), for William Grant Still's 1949 Troubled Island, set in Haiti during the Napoleonic era. Auden wrote or co-wrote half a dozen libretti, his first, for Britten's 1941 Paul Bunyan, on his own; the others, for Stravinsky's 1951 The Rake's Progress, Henze's 1961 Elegy for Young Lovers, Henze's 1966 The Bassarids, Nicholas Nabokov's 1973 Love’s Labour's Lost, and John Gardner's 1974 "antimasque," The Entertainment of the Senses, all with Chester Kallman. As pure Auden, Paul Bunyan certainly bears some looking at, not the least of which for its whimsical humor and quite serious ahead-of-its-time sense of environmentalism. (This is a good place to note that poet Ezra Pound composed two operas, eccentrically scored as throwbacks to pre-Rossinian musical standards!) When Bernstein's 1956 Candide was first conceived as a Broadway show, it brought together the literary forces of several librettists including poet/short story-writer Dorothy Parker, who contributed the words for work’s "Gavotte," and novelist Lillian Hellman.

And this brings us into the territory of 20th century novelists. Betcha didn't know that Thomas Hardy wrote an opera libretto, for the 1924 The Queen of Cornwall, part of an Arthurian opera cycle composed by our old friend Rutland Boughton. Hardy had also wanted to write a libretto for Elgar, but Elgar had rejected the subject matter (Hardy's own stories, which he deemed too everyday) and that project came to nought. A few year's before the turn of the century, J.M. Barrie and Arthur Conan Doyle collaborated on a libretto for the 1893 Jane Annie, composed by Ernest Ford. Although one would think that such a literary team would make for a surefire success, the opera flopped. French novelist Colette is of course far more renowned as the librettist for Ravel's enduring 1925 The copyright of the article Literary Libretti in Opera is owned by . Permission to republish Literary Libretti in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.