"Music's Obedient Daughter" [antikvár]

Introduction Sabine Lichtenstein In 2009, 1 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).