Complaints about the libretto have long shadowed The Magic Flute. The spoken dialogue especially has been disparaged, first regarding plot and, recently, gender and race. This chapter argues that to cut the dialogue is to lose a wealth of detail with respect to character and plot that needs to be understood as essential to the dramatic action. It offers close readings starting at the level of words or phrases that cannot be lost without consequence. Issues examined in speech include class and institutional hypocrisy (Tamino and Papageno); gender (the Queen of the Night); race (Monostatos); and female ambition (Sarastro). Each character conveys in speech a desire to be seen beyond stereotype, demonstrated here alongside relevant social context in Mozart’s time and ours. With nuanced treatment of controversial issues, the chapter debunks a fundamentally flawed justification for cuts – that our society is morally superior to the one that produced this work.

This chapter focuses on The Magic Flute’s links to theatrical aesthetics of the Vienna court theater as well as debates surrounding the late eighteenth-century calls for the establishment of a German national theater tradition. This exploration suggests that Mozart’s unique experiences with the world of late eighteenth-century German theater traditions shaped The Magic Flute’s libretto significantly. Mozart’s contributions to Schikaneder’s libretto in fact enhance the work’s status as both a culmination of decades-long debates about German national theater and a harbinger of a future course for German national opera.

This chapter considers the life and works of Puccini’s various librettists and their working relationships with the composer. It also examines the literary sources that provided the inspiration for, or formed the basis of, the various libretti. Ferdinando Fontana, a member of the Scapigliatura movement, collaborated with Puccini on Le Villi and Edgar. Manon Lescaut was a team effort, worked on variously by Marco Praga, Domenico Oliva, Giuseppe Giacosa, the composer Ruggero Leoncavallo, and the publisher Giulio Ricordi. With La bohème, Puccini settled into a regular partnership with Giacosa and Luigi Illica, whose writing careers are expanded upon here at length, and with whom he would collaborate again on Tosca and Madama Butterfly. For La fanciulla del West, Puccini collaborated with more inexperienced writers, Guelfo Civinini and Carlo Zangarini. La rondine, written as a commission for a Viennese operetta venue (though ultimately premiered in Monte Carlo because of the outbreak of war), brought him into collaboration with Giuseppe Adami, who would also work with Puccini on Il tabarro and Turandot (with Renato Simoni). Gianni Schicchi and Suor Angelica were written by the Florentine writer Giovacchino Forzano.

It is well known that most of Telemann’s regular church music was conceived in the context of annual cantata cycles. Yet there are still many individual works that have not been assigned to any cycle, raising the possibility that they may offer clues to identifying previously unknown ones. In some fortunate circumstances, published poetry allows us to assign music to a particular cantata cycle, as in the case of poems by Erdmann Neumeister, Tobias Heinrich Schubart, Gottfried Behrndt, and others. When this is not the case, one must investigate formal, musical, or other parameters in order to establish a likely connection to a cycle. These methodological possibilities are applied here to identify a fragmentarily preserved cycle that was first performed in Hamburg during the 1733–34 church year.

Benjamin Britten did more than any other composer since Henry Purcell to promote the genre of English opera and its use of the English language. There is less consensus on the contribution made by Myfanwy Piper as Britten’s librettist for The Turn of the Screw, Owen Wingrave, and Death in Venice. Even a limited degree of familiarity with her libretti for Britten induces admiration owing to the precision behind her choice of word and phrase and the way they it can enhance immediacy. She herself has observed that all three libretti that she wrote for Britten were based on sophisticated texts. In his librettist, Britten trusted his closest concerns: someone who could translate the drama in the literary texts into taut succinct scenes; manage abrupt changes of mood; dovetail each scene neatly into the next so that narrative suspense is was sustained; and who could also manage pace, climax, and dramatic development with tact and sensibility. In all this Myfanwy Piper excelled, and she remains unsurpassed in the economy with which she handled words.

From mid-1943 until late-1950, Eric Crozier was an essential asset to Britten’s industry. His work alongside director and radio producer Tyrone Guthrie not only introduced Crozier to the Old Vic in London, but to the BBC as well, where Guthrie also worked. Joan Cross invited Crozier and Guthrie to each direct two different productions at Sadler’s Wells in 1943. Crozier directed and produced Britten’s first two operas, Peter Grimes in 1945 at Sadler’s Wells, and The Rape of Lucretia in 1946 for the short-lived Glyndebourne English Opera Company. Crozier wrote the librettos for Albert Herring and the children’s entertainment Let’s Make an Opera (with its central opera, The Little Sweep), in addition to writing the text for the cantata Saint Nicolas, and with E. M. Forster, he was co-librettist for Billy Budd. Britten, Crozier, and designer John Piper founded the English Opera Group. The endeavour was based on ‘the Britten–Crozier doctrine’ that sought the group’s own autonomy and ultimately a home to produce such works. That home was largely realised in the founding of the Aldeburgh Festival of Music and the Arts in 1948, for which Crozier was a founder and co-artistic director.

Euridice had a poetic text by Ottavio Rinuccini, and music by Jacopo Peri and Giulio Caccini; its performers included Florentine singers plus others from Mantua and Rome; and its sponsor, Jacopo Corsi, was one of the four instrumentalists who provided the accompaniment. Although it is the “first” opera to have survived complete, it has tended to be treated as an academic exercise, and as a mere forerunner of the seemingly more successful early operas by the likes of Claudio Monteverdi. But having reconstructed the stage, it is now possible to read Euridice in a much more practical light, as something of and for the theatre. Both the text and the music make much more sense in these pragmatic terms, especially given the hitherto unrecognized revisions made to the libretto as decisions needed to be made during the rehearsals leading up to the premiere. Matters of casting, stage movement, costumes, and gesture all come into play, often cued by explicit or implicit directions in the surviving sources. This also offers a more careful way of reading poetic librettos and musical scores that are too often viewed in the abstract without grasping their performative functions.

The tragedian Aeschylus is said to have called his plays slices from Homer’s banquet, by which he presumably meant slices from what Homer had left behind on the table.1 It is much easier, as Aeschylus knew (and so famously did), to develop stories that Homer probably knew but did not tell or (as Roman poets eventually did) to weave new stories using Homeric techniques than it is to rework in an artistically effective way what Homer had already done in the Iliad and Odyssey. A change of genre may certainly make that task easier, and the aim of this essay is to look specifically at what happens when a slice from Homer’s own platter becomes a libretto and then, in turn, a performable opera. The specific process in question involves the self-styled poème lyrique of the prolific dramatist, librettist, and actor René Fauchois and Pénélope, the opera made from it by Gabriel Fauré.