The Nitty-Gritty of Opera Libretti

A libretto isn’t a play, lyric or poem. So what is it?

Benjamin Britten, E.M. Forster, W.H. Auden: three artists from the 20th century, all gay British men, all titans in their fields – and all in different fields. Forster was a novelist and Auden a poet, and yet Britten the composer sought both out as collaborators. He wanted to write great operas, and he identified both writers as great potential librettists.

 Forster and Auden took to the task very differently. Auden relished the chance to flex his versifying muscles; Forster wrote, with a touch of relief, “Luckily nothing has to rhyme”. The two operas that resulted – Paul Bunyan (1941, written with Auden) and Billy Budd (1951, written with Forster and Eric Crozier) – both start with prologues, but these prologues couldn’t read more differently.

Auden’s begins:

CHORUS OF OLD TREES

Since the birth
Of the earth
Time has gone
On and on:
Rivers saunter,
Rivers run,
Till they enter
The enormous level sea,
Where they prefer to be.

 …while Forster/Crozier’s reads:

VERE

I am an old man who has experienced much. I have been a man of action and have fought for my King and country at sea.
I have also read books and studied and pondered and tried to fathom eternal truth.
Much good has been shown me and much evil, and the good has never been perfect. There is always some flaw in it, some defect, some imperfection in the divine image, some fault in the angelic song, some stammer in the divine speech. So that the evil still has something to do with every human consignment to this planet of earth.

The American Opera Initiative 2023-4 cohort looking colourful

Auden’s libretto reads like poetry – or rather, like a nursery rhyme, arguably even doggerel. It opens with blisteringly tight rhyming couplets; it doesn’t have, or attempt to have, the depth or density of poetry. The effect is flashy, if a touch shallow.

Forster and Crozier’s libretto has the elevation of poetry, but, in its expansiveness and lack of metre, reads more like prose. There’s little attempt at economy – in fact, the expansiveness is the point. Form matches content; grand ideas are discussed in long sentences of mysterious, grand, old-sounding language.

Isn’t it interesting how both are seen as entirely legitimate approaches to writing an opera libretto?

When I got my first commission in 2021 (for a piece that coincidentally ended up playing at the Royal College of Music’s Britten Theatre!), I sat down and tried to figure out what some of the guiding principles behind writing a strong libretto might be. After all, even if you don’t want to follow every rule, it’s useful to know the rulebook.

And yet the only resources I could find were invariably “big picture”. I found plenty of useful material about three-act structures, The Hero’s Journey, dramatic irony etc. I learnt about the importance of crafting an outline with your composer in advance of writing a single word or note. (Opera, for better or worse, has a tradition of librettists working privately on finishing an entire draft, then handing over the pages to the composer and allowing them to set everything to music, also in private.)

But try as I might, I couldn’t find what I most wanted: some practical, sentence-level guidance on how to write a libretto that would be easy to set and easy to sing; something about the differences between a strong libretto and a strong musical theatre lyric, or how both might differ from a poem or a piece of prose; some tips on how to allow the composer express their voice while keeping a crackle of wit and wordplay in the text.

I want to dig a bit deeper into these questions. I want to analyse some examples on a granular level, and see what lessons they can offer to would-be opera librettists.

Klaxon alert: I’m absolutely not any kind of authority. I’m just someone trying to figure this stuff out. But this year, I’ve had the amazing good fortune of being an American Opera Initiative Fellow. With Joy Redmond, I’m writing another chamber opera, this one bound for the Kennedy Center in 2024. Most importantly, I’ve had the privilege of learning from some world-class mentors and teachers at AOI and NYU; I won’t embarrass them by naming them, but I’m grateful to them all.

Let’s try and unpick some of these lessons.

Libretto vs. Lyric

Needless to say, there’s no single formula for writing a libretto.

Some of the most splendidly successful modern libretti vary widely. As One (music by Laura Kaminsky, libretto by Mark Campbell and Kimberly Reed) unfolds through epigrammatic lines, threaded with repetitions and occasional rhymes:

HANNAH AFTER

I let the pen guide me,
My writing like a girl’s.
Generous loops,
Graceful swirls,
Expansive ascenders,
Crosses with curls.

By contrast, Fellow Travelers (music by Gregory Spears, libretto by Greg Pierce) employs highly dialogic lines that, if not sung, would be at home in a play:

TIM

Hiya, Francie! Tip-top news from the Hill. You heard me. Your kid brother’s got a fancy new job writing speeches for a Senator… Senator Potter. Thanks to a phone call from a wonderful new friend: Hawkins Fuller. His friends call him “Hawk.” We met at an endless boring party. He might be my first actual friend in this every-man-for-himself town. How are you both, and my incoming niece or nephew? You’re naming it Timmy, right? No matter the gender?

The speechlike quality of the sung lines is very funny! Alongside the rich, Puccinian lushness of Spears’s music, they feel playful and irreverent – reflecting the playfulness and irreverence of the character.

From our workshop at the Kennedy Center rehearsal studios

To complicate matters further: not only do many successful modern libretti differ from each other, they also often shift registers within themselves. As One at one point slips into a terrifying duet of sorts: Hannah After sings an account of being assaulted by a stranger, while Hannah Before speaks a list of murdered trans people. The clash of musicalised vs. unmusicalised text, story vs. reality, is viscerally horrifying; the libretto has line-breaks but the effect is relentless and overwhelming. Fellow Travelers, on the other hand, often shifts from mock-dialogic lines into gorgeous, lyrical arias. The contrast is the point: a day at the office is prosaic, a night with your lover transcendent.

So, when successful recent libretti vary so widely between each other and within themselves, what lessons (if any) can we learn?

I think the first important principle is that, unlike the lyrics of most musicals, an opera libretto must contain everything.

It’s a well-earned cliché of musical theatre that the characters sing when they are moved beyond speech. Opera writers rarely have that luxury; their characters sing pretty much whenever they have something to say. It’s not that you can’t have dialogue in opera (witness The Magic Flute); it’s that the operatic emphasis on vocal production, non-amplification and large orchestras often makes dialogue impractical or underwhelming.

Librettists, therefore, can’t rely on the musical theatre trick of having characters speak exposition and sing emotion. And in opera, there isn’t such a sharp distinction between prose and lyric anyway. Contemporary musical theatre, tied as it is to 20th century pop music, favours four-bar phrases, pulse, antecedents and consequents, consistent time signatures. Contemporary opera generally eschews such predictability. But a lyric’s “lyricness” is virtually inseparable from the music’s rhythmic predictability.

What does that mean? Consider the following lyric from the late, great Sheldon Harnick:

Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match,
Find me a find, catch me a catch.
Night after night in the dark I’m alone,
So find me a match of my own.

Of course, composer Jerry Bock didn’t have to set it in a sixteen-bar phrase. He didn’t have to let the rhymes land on the important beats. The text has a dactylic lilt, but he could have written music that was totally different. But in that case, the lyric and music would have been pulling in different directions. Certain features of the lyric that make it lyrical – the rhymes, the metre – demand a certain kind of musical setting.

On the other hand, imagine if Fiddler on the Roof had been devised as an opera. Jerry Bock might then have rejected this text as being too square. The lyric practically insists on a sixteen-bar phrase and a “tum-tee-tee-tum” flow. But an opera composer, interested in subverting rhythmic and harmonic predictability, could easily complain that these elements set unwelcome constraits on the yet-to-be-written music.

(That was my UK writing partner’s advice before I sat down to write my first libretto. He said he liked the kinks and curlicues of speech-rhythms; they would enable moments of musical interest. Seamlessly flowing lyrics are often good in musical theatre, but bad in opera. Weird, idiosyncratic speech-rhythms are often bad in musical theatre, but good in opera.)

And it’s not just the flow of theatre lyrics that make them distinctively lyrical; it’s their adherence to overarching rhyme schemes, distinctive metrical templates, recurring textual patterns. The predictability of these patterns – i.e. the “periodicity” – is part of what makes a theatre lyric sing, but is anathema to an opera composer.

Still with me?

To summarise so far: operas are often resistant to “lyrical” lyrics. Partly that’s because a libretto must do the prosaic work of establishing exposition, character, relationship dynamics – i.e. establishing the waters the characters swim in. (A theatre song, by contrast, is usually a moment of emotional escalation, a brief instant where characters are transported beyond their normal vernaculars and communicate more colourfully and eloquently than before.) In addition, lyrical lyrics demand certain kinds of predictable rhythmic settings that opera composers may find objectionable, or at least insipid. Operas tend not to favour song form; musicals trade in them.

So, then, what kind of text does opera favour?

It seems to me there are three features shared by many successful modern libretti.

Opera Loves Repetition. Opera Loves Repetition.

Musical theatre songs have hooks – moments where melody, rhythm and lyric fuse to create an ear-catching phrase that gets to the heart of the song, usually at the beginning or end of the wider passage. Good libretti often seek to achieve the same effect without engaging in the periodicity of theatre songs. This involves repetition. Take this example from As One:

HANNAH AFTER

Controlled…
Constrained…
It cannot betray me.
My teachers,
My classmates,
My family
Cannot know.

HANNAH BEFORE

A firm grip,
A taut wrist,
A watchful eye
Maintain
A controlled…
Constrained…
Constricted…
Cursive
As it should be.

As One has been the most produced contemporary American opera since its 2014 premiere

There’s a lyrical echo in “Controlled… / Constrained…”, but it’s a repetition, not a hook. The text is set differently the second time; both pitch and rhythm are changed. What do we learn from this echo? Well, first and foremost, the message is reinforced; not only is the key phrase repeated but the very fact of the echo gives an added sense of inescapability. This is arguably strengthened by the difference in musical settings – almost as if the melody can go where it may, but the truth of the words persists. And by declining to write the echo as a hook – by letting the phrase sit among short, irregular lines rather than fitting it into a metrical and rhyming template – librettists Campbell and Reed give composer Kaminsky a good deal of flexibility to word-paint as she sees fit. The result: plenty of room to play with harmonic and rhythmic expectations, and let the words sing out.

It’s the Economy, Stupid.

Opera libretti tend to be spare, not square.

They’re spare because they favour short, economical lines – lines that let the composer write expressively and expansively, rather than scrambling to set all the text. And they’re not square because they resist periodicity – repeating structures, obvious end-rhyme schemes, seamless metrical flow – in a way that allows the composer to set the text in unusual rhythmic and harmonic ways.

Hang on. Didn’t I just point to Pierce’s and Forster/Crozier’s libretti as models of the genre? And didn’t I draw attention to their expansiveness? Isn’t that the opposite of spareness?

Yes – because both libretti play masterfully with the balance between concision and verbosity. Sometimes the text is speechlike and sprawling, deliberately so. The librettists use this technique to create a variety of effects: humour, stillness, uncertainty, a sense of the everyday. But this kind of expansive writing is the exception, not the rule. As a glance at the libretti shows, Billy Budd and Fellow Travelers both generally deal in shorter, sparer lines, emphasising the moments of expansiveness. Once again, the contrast is the point.

It’s worth noting here that opera libretti have an interesting double nature. From a bird’s eye view, their nearest cousin is probably a play; both forms deal in character, stakes, wants, obstacles, relationships, dialogue, plot and so on. But on a sentence-by-sentence level, a libretto’s nearest cousin will often be a contemporary poem. Most modern poems shun metre, but are intensely aware of rhythm. They rarely use perfect end-rhymes, but they’re attentive to phonetics, echoes, slant rhymes.

In fact, I think the main difference between a poem and text for an aria is that the latter exists in time. A poem may be read and reread, mined again and again for deeper meanings and new resonances. An aria is heard by an audience once. If the meaning escapes them, something has probably gone wrong. A poet, therefore, has the freedom to cluster images and ideas together densely, while a librettist and composer must be careful to track how much an audience can understand on one listen.

Christopher Reid is a master of slant rhyme

Elevate, Elevate, Elevate!

Opera libretti are often written in elevated language.

That’s not to say a librettist should use archaic or highfalutin words. Elevated language is just a counterpart of the short, irregular line lengths, as well as the fact that the characters are singing, not speaking. (If they could just as easily speak, why write an opera?)

There are many ways text can be elevated. Most obviously, you can use a vernacular that goes beyond the everyday. You can have soliloquys. You can make the text epigrammatic and elliptical. You can deploy repetition and allusion. You can fill the text with metaphor and simile. You can make your characters speak with Sorkinesque sharpness, so that even if they use everyday words, their wit is striking and funny.

But one of my favourite ways of elevating text – which I think is possibly underrated? – is to give it a skeleton of slant rhyme. Slant rhyme doesn’t draw attention to itself, like perfect end-rhymes do. It can stay nearly invisible, while doing a great deal to strengthen and poeticise a passage. Take the opening lines of one of my favourite poems, by Christopher Reid, describing the moment of his wife’s death:

Sparse breaths, then none —
and it was done.

Listening and hugging hard,
between mouthings
of sweet next-to-nothings
into her ear —
pillow-talk-cum-prayer —
I never heard
the precise cadence
into silence
that argued the end.
Yet I knew it had happened.

Say it aloud. The intial perfect rhyme (“none/done”) has so much heartbreaking finality. And then the interplay of masculine and feminine slant rhymes gives the poem lilt, poise, structure, while throwing up irregular rhythms that would naturally appeal to a composer.

Doesn’t it suggest a musical contour? Wouldn’t it sing well?

The Grand Finale

Opera is a broad church. It encompasses five hundred years of work, and – despite its reputation as a fusty, old, elitist, European art form – at its best it’s flexible enough to accommodate wildly ambitious, innovative, diverse approaches. Opera can be electronic, jazzy, dialogic, pre-recorded, non-narrative (just ask Philip Glass, Anthony Davis, Du Yun). Opera houses are generally more comfortable mounting untraditional work than Broadway theatres.

All this to say – of course there are no hard-and-fast rules for writing an opera libretto. Any text can be a libretto if claimed as such. Run wild and be free!

I’ve suggested some principles that I think many successful modern libretti adhere to. First, recognise that your libretto – unlike most theatre lyrics – will likely need to contain everything you want to communicate, both the prosaic and the heartfelt. Be sparing with periodicity and song form. Embrace points of reference, little textual echoes, repetitions. Let your text err on the side of economy (although feel free to contrast this with more verbose passages). Consider using elevated language, whatever you decide that is. Experiment with short, irregular line-lengths and half-rhyme. Above all, give the characters a reason to sing, not speak.

Benjamin Britten turned many different kinds of writers into librettists

W.H. Auden and Benjamin Britten never wrote another opera after Paul Bunyan, and ultimately parted ways on bad terms. But Britten was nothing but grateful to Forster. “Apart from the great pleasure it has been, it has been the greatest honour to have collaborated with you, my dear," he wrote in a letter. "It was always one of my wildest dreams to work with EMF – & it is often difficult to realise that it has happened. Anyhow, one thing I am certain of – & that's this; whatever the quality of the music is, & it seems people will quarrel about that for some time to come, I think you & Eric have written incomparably the finest libretto ever. For wisdom, tenderness, & dignity of language it has no equals. I am proud to have caused it to be.”

This hints at the most important lesson of all. Auden was a dominating personality; Forster was sensitive and generous. The best libretto is one that springs from librettist and composer alike – not the product of one mind, but a shared vision. And it should evolve in the composer’s hands. The music will shape the text, just as the text shapes the music.

So find a collaborator you like and respect, and get to work.

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