Download 3 - The Castle Practice

3. The libretto as literature.
Considered as a literary genre – and usually by literary men – the libretto has more
often evoked contempt, or at best an amused indifference, than praise. The reasons for
this are complex. The commonest cause of difficulty, overriding and compounding all
others, is an inability to see (or hear) beyond the words on the printed page. Even a
writer possessed of the most acute literary and dramatic sensibility will misunderstand
the function and effect of the libretto unless he or she is also endowed with sufficient
musicality to respond to the mysterious new compound that results from the fusion of
words with music. Lodovico Muratori in the early 18th century actually described aria
verses as ‘parole non necessarie’ (unnecessary words); but Victor Hugo, though at
first angry with Piave for the liberties he took in transforming Le roi s’amuse into
Rigoletto, later came to envy Verdi the power and unique resources of the operatic
medium. Hugo had himself once written an opera libretto (Esmeralda, for Louise
Bertin, 1836, on his own novel Notre-Dame de Paris).
In reading early criticism of opera and the libretto, it is important to remember that for
the first two centuries of the genre’s existence almost all the commentary comes from
literary men. Only with the arrival of Berlioz and Wagner do we regularly find
composers who are able to enter the public debate as educated intellectuals of high
literary ability. Literary discussion is usually one-sided, rarely viewing opera as a
composite art where the partners are on equal terms. The more useful texts are often
modest practical treatises and observations by men of the theatre; these include the
anonymous author, perhaps Rinuccini’s son, of the manuscript treatise Il corago (‘The
Choragus’, i.e. opera director, c1630), the ractical guide to operatic versification by G.
G. Salvadori (1691), and the observations of the much-travelled German librettist and
translator Barthold Feind (1708).
Other more distinguished literary men have made valuable contributions to the
operatic debate, and figures of the front rank have produced librettos; but until fairly
recently the overwhelming impression left in the minds of interested students of the
libretto, particularly if they are English speaking, is that the libretto is hardly worth
writing about. The notion that the words of an Italian opera were nonsense became a
catch-phrase in English criticism as early as Addison, and a predisposition to expect
nonsense in a libretto leads to unthinking and destructive lapses of judgment. There
are many passages in Antonio Somma’s texts that deserve criticism, or at least
sympathy, but (as Cassi Ramelli has pointed out) the moment when Renato ‘hears the
track of merciless steps’ is not really one of them (‘Sento l’orma dei passi spietati’,
Un ballo in maschera, Verdi, Act 2.iii). This is an example of synaesthesia, a kind of
transference or compression like Milton’s ‘blind mouths’ (Lycidas); Somma may well
have had in mind the almost identical phrase in Manzoni’s I promessi sposi (1828).
Some of the non-musical factors that have combined to give the libretto such a bad
press need to be considered. First, however, it should be emphasized that for some
two centuries of operatic history no one writing about opera would easily have been
able to consult a score: operas were rarely published, and almost never complete. The
critic had only the libretto to work from; nor would he normally be discussing an
actual performance, for analytical reviews in the modern sense did not exist. It is not
therefore surprising that the appearance of the words on the printed page should have
assumed such importance in its own right. (That may explain why it was not until the
19th century that the composer’s habit of repeating the words of arias is seriously
discussed, for of course the repeats of the words are not shown in the libretto; this was
a habit approved by Grillparzer, disliked by Tennyson, avoided by Wagner through
the use of paraphrase, and brilliantly parodied by A. E. Housman.) Even today it
remains hard to assert the rights of the ear over those of the eye. It is partly the look of
the page, partly the false stress on the last rhyming syllable, and partly unfair modern
associations that move us, still, to laughter, when we read Nahum Tate’s couplet,
placed in the mouth of Dido during a furious quarrel:Thus on the fatal Banks of Nile,
Weeps the deceitful Crocodile.In live performance this passes unnoticed. That is to
some extent because of the sheer impetus of the quarrel at the opera’s crisis point, but
mainly because Purcell’s setting (ex.1) removes the (visual) false stress and places the
dangerous word in deep shadow by his astonishing reinforcement of the word
‘weeps’. He omits the comma and rides over the enjambement, so that the rhymeword ‘Nile’ is not emphasized, placing ‘weeps’ unexpectedly on the next (weak) beat,
and strengthens the trochaic stress still further with an irregularly resolved
appoggiatura placed over an acrid off-beat dissonance; the disturbance is heightened
by a syncopation that suppresses the third beat of the bar. An imaginative and
resourceful composer has made a purely literary problem disappear.
On a more general level, a composer may add an unsuspected depth and complexity
to words that seem innocuous or even jejune. At the end of Handel’s Tamerlano
(Piovene, adapted by Haym; 1724), the audience has witnessed the tragic suicide of
the ex-emperor Bajazet, the intense grief of his daughter and the chastening of the
tyrant Tamerlane. The libretto offers a conventional coro for all the survivors to sing:
the lovers are to marry their appropriate partners, and Tamerlane has abandoned his
anger and cruelty. The verse is probably not intended to provide anything more than
the expected lieto fine:D’atra notte già mirasi a scorno
d’un bel giorno
brillar lo splendor.
Frà le tede, che Lachesi accende,
chiara splende
la face d’Amor.(We now see the radiance of a fair day shining out, defying the dark
night. Among the torches lit by [the Fate] Lachesis, brightly shines the lamp of
Love.)After the tragedy, the text seems to the cursory eye an inadequate response.
Handel’s setting of it shows the ability of a Saint-Simon to penetrate behind the
ceremonial of court life to the human passions behind the masks. Tamerlane has
promised to reform, but has been deeply shamed; his bride-to-be has suffered from his
infidelity and witnessed his cruelty; Asteria has seen her father die, a man admired
and loved by her future husband. They are still in the presence of a potentially
dangerous autocrat. Handel therefore sets the coro not as a conventional paean of joy,
such as the text seems to demand, but as a stark, penitential, sorrowing E minor
ensemble that reaches down past the surface of the courtly words to the true feelings
beneath (ex.2). It is unclear whether this is an early example of irony, the music
supplying a contradictory setting of a glib text routinely provided by the poet. In
performance, one is aware of no dissociation or jar between words and music; but one
would hardly have foreseen, reading the words beforehand, what a rich complex of
feeling and thought the music would add.
It is important to remember that a libretto is addressed in the first place to the
composer, and that the convenience of an audience or critic is only a secondary
function. The verbal text alone gives no more than a schematic indication of the way
in which the librettist expects the music to be articulated (‘Recitativo’, ‘Aria’,
‘Introduzione’, ‘Stretta’ etc., or a change in the structure of the verse). It shows
nothing of the musical time-scale, or of what music can do in the way of contrast and
transition. In the earlier part of the 18th century, when Italian opera had adopted a
rigid division between recitative in largely unrhymed versi sciolti of eleven or seven
syllables and aria verse in other metres and always rhymed, opportunities for
composers to disregard the prevailing convention were rare. Even so, the desire to
establish the mood of a scene by giving a character an opening arioso had led them to
invent the cavatina, a short aria ‘cavata’ (‘extracted’, ‘excavated’) from verse
intended by the poet as recitative and originally printed as such. Handel rarely
departed from the expected pattern, but when he omitted or foreshortened an expected
da capo the result is accordingly all the more effective. In Ariodante, Antonio Salvi
can hardly have intended that the king should so charmingly interrupt the da capo of
the duet between his daughter and her lover (in the middle of a word, and on a
dissonance too: ex.3).
When in the 1760s the formal divisions of libretto and music begin to grow less
sharply defined, the role of music in articulating the progress of the drama becomes
ever more important; composer and poet begin to plan as more equal partners, though
this is not always evident from the words alone, and the librettist was often very likely
unaware that he was beginning to lose his responsibility for organizing the business in
hand. ‘Che puro ciel’ in Orfeo ed Euridice (Act 2) looks to the eye like any other
recitative in versi sciolti. Calzabigi, the librettist, probably had no idea that Gluck
would set the phrases of recitative as four meditative interventions in what is
essentially an aria for oboe (derived in its turn from two earlier arias). Mozart’s
perfectly judged musical divisions in the long Act 2 finale of Le nozze di Figaro do
not always fall where Da Ponte’s adoption of a new metre or rhyme scheme suggests
that they should, notably at the Allegro that begins when the Count is hunting in the
closet for Cherubino, and at the velvety Andante when Antonio produces the papers
that the page had dropped in his escape (see Carter 1987). An even more striking case
is the sublime Andante when the Count asks for and receives his wife’s forgiveness in
the Act 4 finale. The text is:count( :in tono supplichevole)
Contessa, perdono.
countessPiù docile sone, :
E dico sì.
allAh! tutti contenti :
Saremo cosiì.PleadingCountess, pardon. I am less obstinate, and say ‘Yes’. Ah! that
will make us all happy.) There is a stage direction, and later a new masculine
rhyme-word (‘sì’), but the Count’s ‘perdono’ repeats the plea (and its rhyme) that
everyone else has been making to him, and there is no change in the metre, senari,
when the Count speaks. The wonderful contrast that places a halo around the principal
characters and the principal message of the opera is apparently Mozart’s idea. More
remarkable yet is that, in order to achieve it, he has refused to interrupt the preceding
Allegro assai with pauses and has denied to Da Ponte the sure-fire laughter he must
have expected as the jealous Count pulls four other characters, one by one, out of the
arbour where he thinks his wife is hiding. In a performance of Beaumarchais’ play
this scene is a riot, and the Count’s increasing discomfiture may be spun out to last a
good minute; but Mozart permits no pause or ritardando, even when the Countess
herself emerges from the opposite arbour (though many conductors slow up at this
point). From the printed libretto, one would expect none of this.
All critical treatments of the libretto seen as literature, then, must be read with
caution. That is not to say that criticism of a libretto’s language is necessarily
misplaced. It was recognized quite early in the 17th century that the claims of musical
form, and the increased difficulty of distinguishing words and retaining them in the
mind in a large theatre with the resonant acoustic necessary for music, demanded
brevity and simple sentences from the librettist (Fabbri 1990). But if the literary
expression of a libretto needs to be terse to the point of baldness, that is no reason for
it to be threadbare or slovenly, or for the audience to be left in confusion over the plot
and the motivation of the characters. In English-speaking countries, more so than in
others, both critics and naive audiences have often reacted unfavourably to the
conventions and language of opera librettos. That is partly because of the unusually
rich and popular tradition of spoken drama (not to mention the dialogue of characters
in novels, and the exceptional wealth of lyric poetry). It is easy to go to the opera
house with false expectations. Fine language has its own music, with which added
music may not chime, as may be noticed when straining to follow the long blankverse lines in Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream – where the lyric songs are
magically effective because intended for setting. Vaughan Williams’s Sir John in
Love fares better because its source, The Merry Wives of Windsor, is in prose.
Otherwise, it is no accident that the completely successful Shakespeare operas were
composed to foreign-language librettos, in which the thought could be presented more
trenchantly and clearly and in more modern language.
Much unfavourable literary criticism of the opera libretto by British writers should
properly have been directed at the English translations in which operas were heard
and read. Translators into English experience difficulties in finding equivalents in
their basically iambic language for the normally trochaic endings of Italian verse,
difficulties that may lead them into those special ‘librettese’ forms of verbs, the
operatic future tense (‘From their ambush they soon will be bursting’: Dent, Un ballo
in maschera) and the operatic reflexive (‘Out we’ll go then, till we find us/With the
garden gate behind us’: Dennis Arundell, Il matrimonio segreto). No wonder opera
librettos enjoy such a bad reputation. (See also Translation.)