Literary Libretti
href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B...">L'Enfant et les Sortilèges, an imaginative work quite unlike her chic and sophisticated society fiction. E.M. Forster, best known for uppercrust romantic novels, also happens to be the co-librettist, with Eric Crozier, of Britten's 1951 all-male-cast Billy Budd, which one would be hard-put to imagine as a Merchant-Ivory film! Perhaps such writers enjoyed breaking away from their usual output when an opera was involved.
Let us consider playwrights, now. A truly wild card is Thornton Wilder, who adapted his own drama, The Long Christmas Dinner, into a libretto set by Hindemith (1961). The German composer's only English opera, it features members of several generations of one family as they assemble at and dissemble from one continuous mimed dinner where their births, accomplishments, and deaths are almost incidental to the general table talk. Gertrude Stein wrote both plays and operas, all quite brilliant if you happen to have that “acquired taste." Thomson's 1934 Four Saints in Three Acts and 1947 The Mother of Us All are the most well known of these. Other Stein libretti include Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights (1938), which was commissioned by eccentric English composer Lord Berners, who unfortunately did not go on to create a score for it. This is a charming work, which I have seen performed as a straight play. Jean Cocteau, who wrote non-operatic drama and also screenplays, produced a number of dark-tinged libretti for works that premiered in 1927: Honegger's Antigone, Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex, and Milhaud's Le Pauvre Matelot. He is also, importantly, librettist of Poulenc's one-singer tour de force, the 1959 La Voix Humaine.
Quite recently, playwright Terrance McNally, whose plays Master Class and The Lisbon Traviata both concern Maria Callas, wrote the libretto for Jake Heggie's 2000 Dead Man Walking as well as for one work ("The Food of Love") in the 1999 opera trilogy Central Park, another mini-opera of which ("The Festival of Regrets") was penned by fellow playwright Wendy Wasserstein. That was an unusual case of librettists receiving far more media attention than did the works' composers, who were Michael Torke and Deborah Drattell respectively. For the record, opera number three was "Strawberry Fields" by composer Robert Beaser and librettist A.R. Gurney.
Can you think of more examples? Please share them in a discussion of this topic. And watch for my next several articles, where other aspects of libretti
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