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.

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.

Britten’s two early operas, Peter Grimes and The Rape of Lucretia, were collaborations with two very different librettists. Both were poets, but the first, Montagu Slater, was also a communist, a practised journalist, novelist, editor, and critic, a decade older than Britten, and he brought considerable scenario, playwriting, and theatrical experience to the project; the second, Ronald Duncan, also a playwright, was an anti-democratic pacifist, convinced of the power of poetic expression and of his value as a poet; he was more willing than Slater to adapt to Britten’s demands, but still had very decided ideas of his own. Britten abandoned Slater after Peter Grimes, despite its success, and The Rape of Lucretia proved the only opera he would write with Duncan. This essay provides a detailed biographical and critical outline of each writer’s work up to their collaboration with Britten, showing how their approaches to writing a libretto differed, what they contributed, and why Britten moved on to other writers for his subsequent operatic work.