Volume 41, Number 18 · November 3, 1994
Words for Music Perhaps
By Robert Craft
The Complete Works of W.H. Auden: Libretti and other Dramatic Writings (1939–1973)
by W.H. Auden, by Chester Kallman, edited by Edward Mendelson
Princeton University Press, 758 pp., $49.50
Most opera libretti have only a marginal existence apart from the music they inspire. Monteverdi's Striggio; Lully's Quinault; Cavalli's Faustini; Gluck's Calzabigi; Mozart's Metastasio (if not his Da Ponte); Bellini's Romani; Rossini's Foppa and Sterbini; Verdi's Piave, Somma, and Ghislanzoni; Puccini's Illica and Giacoso are known almost exclusively through their composer collaborators. If their libretti are read at all, it is as cribs, before, between the acts of, and while listening to operas, not as examples of a literary genre. Yet some of the exceptions are major: the young Voltaire and Rameau; Boito and Verdi; the composer-librettists Berg and Wagner. By way of The Wasteland, the Steersman's song in Tristan is perhaps the best-known German verse in the English-speaking world. In the twentieth century, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Wystan Hugh Auden are the only writers of high achievement outside the opera house to have attained distinction in it as well.
Review, 5863 words
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