[Liszt] was not only a musical genius, but could probably have achieved the heights in another profession too. When a diplomat at the Berlin court once asked him, ‘What would become of you if you suddenly lost your hands?’ he replied composedly: I could still be the world's greatest diplomat’.

Although there have been a few revivals of Verdi's Stiffelio since its first modern performance in 1968, including an important 1985 production at the Teatro La Fenice of Venice, the opera has received until now only limited attention. With two stagings by major theatres in 1993 (London's Covent Garden in January and New York's Metropolitan Opera in October), the situation has changed markedly. Those of us who know Stiffelio well have tried to temper our enthusiasm, avoiding excessive claims and acknowledging some of the work's dramaturgical problems. But it should come as no surprise that an opera exquisitely poised between Luisa Miller and Rigoletto is likely to be worth rehearing, particularly when the work was withdrawn from circulation by its author for reasons having to do primarily with censorship of its libretto (in which the wife of a Protestant minister commits adultery) rather than with intrinsic artistic merit.

By a stroke of coincidence the critic Théodore de Wyzewa found himself sitting next to Jules Massenet during a performance of Parsifal at Bayreuth in August 1886. Massenet's behaviour made a deep enough impression on Wyzewa for him to share it with readers of Le Figaro several years later. ‘He quivered feverishly, became short-breathed, and his large, sombre eyes sparkled in the dark. And when the opera was over, I heard him say to someone in the corridors of the theatre “Ah! I am anxious to return to Paris to burn my Werther!”’ Wyzewa published his piece on the day of Werther's Paris première. In a city where Wagner stagings had recently become all the rage, this was hardly a ringing endorsement; but Wyzewa had a more important point. Massenet provided a prime example of an ill that had descended on French composers, all too many of whom had sacrificed native qualities in vain, sterile imitations of Wagner. Pale beside the ‘enchanted treasure of dream and fantasy’ (‘le trésor enchanté du rêve et de la fantaisie’) in Wagner's textures, such imitations had taken on a merely formulaic character.

It is a commonplace that the poetry best suited to an operatic libretto has fewer pretensions, and more transparency in the range of interpretations that can be placed upon it, than ‘literary’ poetry. Otherwise, it will scarcely bear the weight of the music, much less contribute to the great emotional climaxes that justify opera for many listeners in the first place. And some might mistrust a libretto that is too ‘literary’ or too complicated, for metaphysical and other subtleties are not easily projected across the footlights. No one was more acutely aware of this ‘unliterary’ relationship between words and music in opera than W. H. Auden. Writing in 1948, he stated: ‘Poetry is in its essence an act of reflection, of refusing to be content with the interjections of immediate emotion in order to understand the nature of what is felt. Since music is in essence immediate, it follows that the words of a song cannot be poetry.’