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T T ex x e t Studies in Comparative Literature 74 Series Editors C.C. Barfoot and Theo D’haen “Music’s Obedient Daughter” The Opera Libretto from Source to Score Edited by Sabine Lichtenstein Amsterdam - New York, NY 2014 Cover picture: www.dreamstime.com The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of ‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence’. ISBN: 978-90-420-3808-0 E-Book ISBN: 978-94-012-1055-3 © Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2014 Printed in The Netherlands CONTENTS Sabine Lichtenstein Introduction 1 Eddie Vetter The Power of Music: Striggio and Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo 11 Jacques Boogaart Octavia Reincarnated: Busenello’s and Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea 37 Tim Carter In the Operatic Workshop: The Case of Varesco’s and Mozart’s Idomeneo 69 Caryl Clark The Librettist’s Dilemma in London: Badini’s and Haydn’s Orfeo ed Euridice 107 Irmlind Capelle “But There Is another Intrigue and a Comic Element Placed Alongside”: Hans Sachs – the Relation of Lortzing’s Opera to Deinhardstein’s Drama 131 Heather Hadlock “Ce bal est original!”: Classical Parody and Burlesque in Orphée aux enfers by Crémieux, Halévy and Offenbach 155 John Neubauer Burning the Heretics and Saving Don Carlos: Méry’s, Du Locle’s and Verdi’s Don Carlos 185 Katherine Syer Tracing Wotan’s Incendiary Past: The Evolution of Storms and Fire in Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen 215 Vincent Giroud Manon at the Opera: From Prévost’s Manon Lescaut to Auber’s Manon Lescaut and Massenet’s Manon 239 Kasper van Kooten “Closed, Efficient, Terrible!”: Reflections on the Genesis and Dramaturgy of Illica’s, Giacosa’s and Puccini’s Madama Butterfly 269 Helga Hushahn The End of a Line: Strauss’ and Hofmannsthal’s Elektra 297 Sabine Lichtenstein “Something Uncommonly German”: Hans Pfitzner’s Palestrina, Eine Musikalische Legende 325 Loes Dommering-van Rongen The Musical Personality of Don Quixote: Manuel de Falla’s El Retablo de Maese Pedro 359 Michal Grover-Friedlander Transformations of the Killing of a Boy: Weill’s and Brecht’s Der Jasager 381 Ruth HaCohen A Theological Midrash in Search of Operatic Action: Moses und Aron by Arnold Schoenberg 405 C.C. Barfoot The Making of a Victim: From Crabbe’s The Borough to Slater’s and Britten’s Peter Grimes 433 Claudia di Luzio Opera on Opera: Luciano Berio’s Opera 463 Notes on Contributors 483 Index 489 INTRODUCTION SABINE LICHTENSTEIN In 2009, I was asked to put together a volume of essays on opera librettos. Since the volume was supposed to appear in a comparative- literature series, I thought it should not offer a historical overview or a theoretical approach, as is the case with Patrick J. Smith’s The Tenth Muse or Albert Gier’s Das Libretto: Theorie und Geschichte einer musikoliterarischen Gattung. The context within which the book was to appear asked for an approach through practical examples and discussions about a libretto’s attributes and what is expected of a librettist mainly in response to the demand of its particular characteristics. The volume should clarify the fundamental differences between the libretto and other literary genres. For the history of the opera has negated the principle “prima le parole e poi la musica”.1 However complex the history of libretto may be, however many twists and turns of argument there may have been, and however different the relation between word and music may be in the case of each work, operas are increasingly received in the arts and in scholarship as a musical genre: Anna Bolena, The Bartered Bride, Oedipus Rex are regarded as works by Donizetti, Smetana, and Stravinsky, rather than by Felice Romani, Karel Sabina, and Jean Cocteau. With few exceptions, they are the subjects of musicological studies. In concert halls and through the media we hear instrumental versions made from sung or unsung opera numbers, but no recited libretto texts without music. In a genetic-chronological sense, the principle “prima le parole” may still have had validity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when librettos were often recycled; but after 1800, this was seldom the case. From then on, 1 The precept is a variation on the title of Antonio Salieri one-Act opera Prima la musica e poi le parole (1786). 2 The Opera Libretto from Source to Score libretto and music were usually written at the same time, and in some cases the music, or segments of it, even preceded the text.2 Britten’s Peter Grimes, as C.C. Barfoot indicates in this volume, is just one of the many examples where the creation of the text often fell behind the composition of the music. In vocal genres, certainly in songs and opera arias, the text aesthetically almost always takes a subordinate role because the words are often not clearly understood but also as it were deconstructed or transcended. As a result, nobody is disturbed by the prosodic incorrectness at the beginning of the famous “La donna è mobile” in Verdi’s Rigoletto: the metric accent falls on “La”, and although many can join in singing the melody, almost all of them lack the precise knowledge of, and even an interest in, the text. However, the most important criterion in this context is neither what came first – the words or the music – nor the perception or the aesthetic deconstruction of the word, but the actual procedure during the making of the work. The manner in which operas are created indicates that Mozart’s famous dictum from 1781 that poetry is “music’s obedient daughter”,3 more correctly reflects the relation between text and music than the early-seventeenth-century idea that music is the “serva” and the word must be the “padrone”.4 As Tim Carter’s article on Idomeneo shows, Mozart’s dictum needs to be refined, also in the case of his own work. Though also the texts of recitatives, even spoken texts, adjust to the medium of music, in recitatives especially, music follows linguistic accents. In spoken texts, music is even more obedient: it is altogether silent.5 A man like Pietro Metastasio, whose librettos were used by composers repeatedly, did not see himself as an obedient daughter. However, at the end of the eighteenth century Metastasio’s time was over. From then on the wishes of the composer determined to large extent the form of the text. It was not the librettist who asked the composer to change the music, but the composer who explained to the poet what he needed. 2 Salieri’s title also refers to the order in which the components were written. Lacking inspiration, a librettist is trying here to accommodate himself to already composed music, deviating thus from the general practice. 3 See the bibliographic data in the article on Idomeneo in this volume. 4 Claudio Monteverdi, Scherzi Musicali, Preface (1607). See n.40 in the article on L’Orfeo in this volume. 5 The melodrama, exclusively defined by music-supported spoken texts, could stay alive in the long term only as a cherished technique especially for hair-raising moments, but not as a genre. Introduction 3 Bellini, for instance, is known to have given exact instructions to his librettists concerning metre, sometimes from scene to scene and figure to figure. Resistance from poets led ever more frequently to tensions between them and the composers. These were often the result of different interpretations of the source, and even more frequently, a clash between the composer’s musico-dramatic demands and the librettist’s poetic concerns.6 Kasper van Kooten quotes in his article Giuseppe Giacosa’s remark that as the poet of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly he had “entirely sacrificed himself”. Giacosa spoke on behalf of many: he, and Montagu Slater (the librettist of Peter Grimes), and Giovanni B. Varesco (the librettist of Idomeneo), are just three of the many librettists who responded to (and relieved) their literary frustrations with separate editions of their texts that dropped all the changes forced on them by the composer. Giacosa and many of his colleagues thought that a libretto ought to be a literary work which could function independently, though Bellini had almost seventy years earlier told Carlo Pepoli, the librettist of I Puritani, that this assumption was a serious mistake. His words, as far as I know the only aesthetic credo that Bellini uttered, became well known: Should my music be beautiful and please [people] you could write a million letters against the composers’ abuse of poetry etc., but then you have not proven anything .… Carve into your mind in solid stone letters: the music drama must bring people to cry, shiver, and die through the singing …. And do you know why I have said that a good drama lacks healthy reason? Because I know well what an intractable animal a literary man is ….7 As a bel canto composer, Bellini in this remark may have overemphasized singing, but he was not the only one in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries who asserted that musical drama was not about healthy reason. In 1771 Charles Burney complained about “Marcello’s famous cantata called Cassandra, where this composer has entirely sacrificed the music to the poetry, by changing the time or style of his movement at every new idea which 6 The tensions are mirrored in Richard Strauss’ one-Act Capriccio (1942), which, like Salieri’s Prima la musica, is a meta-opera. 7 Bellini to Carlo Pepoli, May 1834, in Bellini Epistolario, ed. Maria Luisa Cambi, Milan, 1943, 400.