The tenth muse : a historical study of the opera libretto / by Patrick J. Smith.

Author/creator Smith, Patrick J., 1932-
Format Book
Publication InfoNew York : Schirmer Books, ©1970, 1975.
Descriptionxiv, 417, xvi pages ; 21 cm
Subjects
Libretto.
Music and literature.

Contents Introduction -- The seventeenth-century Italian libretto -- Busenello -- The beginnings of the French libretto -- Quinault -- The first Italian reform -- Metastasio -- The eighteenth-century Italian comic libretto -- The eighteenth-century French comic libretto -- The second Italian reform -- The reform libretto in France -- The fin-de-siècle Italian libretto -- The French libretto of the revolutionary period -- The Italian melodramma -- The French grand opera -- The later Italian melodramma -- The German libretto to Wagner -- Wagner -- The nineteenth-century Opéra Comique and W. S. Gilbert -- The French libretto of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries -- Boito -- The German and Italian librettos of the fin de siècle and early twentieth century -- Hofmannsthal -- Aspects of the later twentieth-century libretto -- Metastasio's letter to Johann Adolf Hasse.
Abstract This lively volume of scholarship is the first critical history of the libretto, the first book about opera to focus on the words and their relationship to the music. It begins at the beginning of opera, in the early seventeenth century. It continues with such notable librettists as Lorenzo Da Ponte (Don Giovanni, The Marriage of Figaro), Eugéne Scribe, Emile Zola, Arrigo Boito (Otello, Falstaff), W. S. Gilbert, and--his own librettist--Wagner, and arrives at our own century with Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Gertrude Stein, and Bertolt Brecht. Writing about their lives, their works, their collaborations with the composers, the author goes to the original sources of librettos, analyzes the shifting relationships (within opera) of drama, dance, words, and music, and illuminates the essential contributions of libretto to opera. The effect is one of revelation: the reader fully comprehends for the first time the roles played by the great Italian, French, German, and English librettists, and the germinative value of their theatrical works, without which we should not have had the repertoire, as we know it, of operatic works by the great composers from Monteverdi to Mozart, Rossini, Verdi, and Richard Strauss.
Bibliography noteIncludes bibliography (pages 411-417) and index.

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