I’ve been listening to a couple of English operas the past few days (and went to see the ROH double bill of L’Heure Espagnol and Gianni Schicchi) and it’s all got me thinking about the libretto of an opera and where it comes from.
The English operas are Vaughan Williams’ Riders to the Sea and (after a lot of recent twitter action about Opera Australia’s production) Britten’s Peter Grimes. Two different approaches to source texts you couldn’t find – Vaughan Williams pretty much sets the text of Synge’s one act play as he found it, whilst Montagu Slater, in his libretto for Grimes, takes a section of a larger poem and turns it into a new work in its own right. Grimes is an out and out sadist in Crabbe’s original poem, yet Slater and Britten blur the edges between what Grimes has done and how he’s treated to the point where a good performance can floor you with the tragedy of it all.
This made me think of Gianni Schicchi, which I saw at Covent Garden the week before last. Here we have a work expertly crafted (by Giovacchino Forzano) from a handful of lines taken from a much larger work (Dante’s Inferno). Forzano takes Schicchi, a minor character given a passing mention, and explores his story in full. We all know there’s great skill in taking a source text ad adapting it so it works dramatically when sung. It’s a completely different thing though to take a fragment of something and work it into a full-scale masterpiece in its own right, creating a dramatic structure and singable text as you go.
All of this has given me a new-found respect for the art of the librettist and convinced me of the worth of reading the source materials an opera came from, not necessarily to enhance my understanding of the opera itself (if the libretto works it should stand alone), but just to see the craft that goes into preparing a text to be sung and acted in the unique form that is opera. I’m sure this is a stage many of you have already been through in your journey through opera but, for a relative newcomer like me, it opened my eyes further and reminded me that one of the reasons I love opera so much is the sheer number of angles you can approach it from.
OK, back to writing content for the website – must add a list of librettists to the ever-growing phase 2 content list!
Matt
. Soon after I found a copy of Ernest Newman’s excellent Wagner Nights in a second hand bookshop and it quickly became my bible for all things Ring-related. A few weeks later the flat I lived in was burgled and my bag (containing the copy of Wagner Nights) was nicked.
