(It.: ‘small book’; Fr. livret; Ger. Textbuch).
A printed or manuscript book giving the literary text, both sung and spoken, of an opera (or other musical work). The word has also come to mean the text itself (for discussion of the literary text see GroveO, ‘Libretto (ii)’).
RICHARD MACNUTT
For three centuries the principal purpose of the published libretto was to provide for those attending a performance of an opera the text and a list of the characters. In most operatic centres until late in the 19th century, and in many until early in the 20th, a new libretto was customarily printed for each production and was available before the first performance. From simple beginnings the libretto gradually developed in extent and scope to become a detailed and reliable source of information on many aspects of the performance of individual operas, and it sometimes provides the sole surviving record of the very existence of an opera.
Up to about 1900 the libretto generally gives information about the date of the production, the size and constitution of the orchestra (often with the names of the principals), the names of the composer, the poet, the singers (which enables their mobility, careers and repertories to be studied), the musical director, the impresario, the scene designers, the machinists and other stage staff, the choreographer and the dancers; sometimes it also gives details of the dances performed and, especially in Italy, full synopses of the ballets that were traditionally given on the same bill as operas. Evidence of censorship is often present, especially in Italy and France. It is evident therefore that the libretto, as well as providing valuable testimony about textual variants between different productions of individual operas, makes possible the study of the repertories and histories of opera houses, local customs, censorship and many other factors relating to the mounting of particular operas and to the history of opera in general.
Although librettos are now recognized as important tools for researchers, when originally published they were intended for nothing more than immediate, practical use. Until well into the second half of the 19th century they were the basic source of information for the operagoer, who would purchase a copy inside or outside the theatre (profits being the perquisite of the librettist) together with the playbill, and would be able to follow the text during the performance, thanks to undimmed lighting and assisted if necessary by wax tapers. Librettos were usually pocket-sized, printed on cheap paper, sewn into wrappers and rife with typographical errors: ephemeral objects, quickly redundant. Especially valuable to scholars are copies that survive with contemporary annotations – noting a change of cast, a cut or, all too rarely, details of stage movement or revisions by a librettist or impresario.
Towards the end of the 19th century the flexibility brought by electricity to theatre lighting, combined with the evolution of the opera programme and the standardization of the repertory, transformed the libretto into an object intended to have a more enduring function, with much of its topical content discarded – a source to be read or referred to not so much in the theatre as at home, before and after the performance.
A number of collected editions, providing permanent records of the writings of several eminent librettists, have been published, invariably in more elegant form than the original separate editions. The earliest date from the 17th century.
The earliest librettos, published in Florence, were printed in small quarto format (about 21 cm high) and contained between 12 and 20 leaves. The first to appear was for the first opera, Peri's setting of Rinuccini's Dafne, performed in Carnival 1598 and published by Giorgio Marescotti in 1600. The title-page names the poet, the sponsor of the performance (Jacopo Corsi), the person in whose honour it was given, the place and date of publication and the publisher. The only other preliminary to the text is the list of characters (without the singers' names), here called ‘interlocutori’ – for which alternative terms include ‘personaggi’, ‘intervenienti’ and ‘attori’. The libretto concludes with verses addressed to Corsi – the first tribute of a kind that was to become a common feature of 17th-century librettos. The title-page of the second published libretto, Rinuccini's Euridice (1600), mentions the occasion for the performance; the preliminaries include a three-page dedication from Rinuccini to Maria de' Medici, an important historical note that refers to the previous performances of Dafne, expresses Rinuccini's approval of the suitability of the modern music for the setting of tragedies, names Peri as the composer, and justifies his own alterations to the conclusion of the fable.
These two librettos contain only brief stage directions; those for Monteverdi's Arianna and Ballo delle ingrate (published in Compendio delle sontuose feste, Mantua, 1608) are more extensive. Gradually during the first half of the century further information began to be given and librettos were more commonly printed in a smaller format (octave, duodecimo or sextodecimo). Exceptions were sometimes made for special occasions, when a more sumptuous publication, perhaps illustrated with scene designs, might be produced; one of the earliest such examples is the libretto for Marco da Gagliano's La Flora (Florence, 1628), text by Andrea Salvadori, which includes illustrations of five scenes, designed by Giulio Parigi and engraved by his son Alfonso.
It was usual for an ‘argomento’ (an outline of the plot before the action commences) to be printed. From about 1650 this was sometimes divided by the words ‘che si finge’ into two sections, the first having historical or documentary precedent while the second was the invention of the author. From the 1620s for about a century the argomento was occasionally published separately from, or instead of, the libretto. An early example is Marco da Gagliano's sacred drama La regina Sant'Orsola (text by A. Salvadori): the argomento was published in 1624 and the libretto in the following year. In 1638 an ‘Argomento e scenario’ was published for Manelli's La Delia (text by G. Strozzi): this formula was occasionally reverted to during the following half-century.
It was also customary to print an address to the reader (headed, for example, ‘ai lettori’ or ‘l'autore a chi legge’); this was sometimes written and signed by the composer, impresario or printer but more often by the librettist. The names of the performers were seldom printed in 17th-century Italian librettos. A rare exception occurs in the publisher's informative preface to Andromeda (the opera that inaugurated in 1637 the first public opera house, the S Cassiano in Venice); this names and makes brief comments on the composer, singers, dancers and choreographer. One of the earliest librettos to print a formal cast list was Alessandro vincitor di se stesso, text by F. Sbarra, music by A. Cesti and M. Bigongiari (1654, Lucca), but it was not until about 1700 that the singers were regularly named in Italian librettos; when they were, the posts they held at court were often stated and, where relevant (particularly for castratos), their nicknames.
Librettos vary in content and appearance according to their publisher and the place of performance, but by early in the 18th century most contained not only the features already mentioned but others as well. Among these were lists of scenes and of machines and effects, a ‘protesta’ (an affirmation of the poet's belief in the Catholic Church, despite what might be inferred from the characters and subject matter of the opera), alternative arias (usually printed as a supplement at the end) and cuts observed in the performance. The latter were often indicated (from the late 17th century) by versi virgolati, double commas in the margin to indicate passages which either were not set to music at all or were omitted from the performance for the sake of brevity (fig.1): this procedure allowed the poet's work to be read unabridged. Paste-over slips were also used to make changes or to correct mistakes.
During the first half of the 18th century it became customary to name the musical director and costume designer and, in the second half, the producer, copyist, orchestral principals, chorus and even (though rarely) the understudies; occasionally notices were printed about the precise dates of performance during the season and the availability of the music. From the early years of the 19th century it became usual to name the prompter and lighting director and from the 1820s the whole orchestra was sometimes listed.
Dance was an important ingredient of opera until the mid-19th century and the libretto is one of the best sources of information about it. There are numerous references to ballets, dances, dancers and choreographers in 17th-century librettos, but it was not until the mid-18th century that synopses of full-length ballets and lists of all the participants began to be printed in the libretto, normally on a few pages at the end or, less frequently, between the acts of the opera. This practice lasted until the 1860s, after which ballet synopses were published as separate booklets on their own, a custom that had been initiated as early as the 1770s.
During the 19th century there were many further innovations in the development of the Italian libretto. Printed wrappers, replacing plain ones, were introduced no later than 1814, and by the early 1830s the back wrappers had started to be used for announcing the ballets to be performed or for advertising publications. At about this time publishers began to print the price of the libretto, on either the wrappers or the title-page, and to give typographical emphasis to star names in the cast list; and in the mid-1830s polychrome printing on both title-page and wrappers was introduced. Until the 1840s the libretto was not normally printed by the publisher of the music but by a general publisher who had the concession from the theatre. Thereafter the more powerful music publishers also began to take over publication of the text. In addition to the fully detailed librettos printed for particular performances, copies of regularly performed operas were printed for general sale without any performance or production details; these could be adapted for use for a specific performance by the substitution of a newly printed title-page and cast-leaf or by paste-over addenda slips. New forms of in-house control were instigated: from 1843 Ricordi included librettos within their regular system of plate numbers, from 1860 they applied blind date stamps to indicate the year and month of issue, and from 1865 both they and Lucca sometimes used printed date stamps. Until 1874 wrappers were generally printed by letterpress, often embellished by typographical ornaments, but in that year Ricordi published the first Italian libretto (Verdi, Macbeth, designed by Prina) whose wrappers set out to give a visual impression of the flavour of the opera, usually by depicting a scene from the work. Macbeth was printed in monochrome, but from 1877 chromolithographic wrappers on librettos, just as on vocal scores, were frequently used.
The development of the libretto in Italy strongly influenced the form in which the artefact was published elsewhere. The first libretto for a German opera was for Schütz's Dafne, to a text by Martin Opitz after Rinuccini, published in 1627. This quarto names both the composer and the librettist and contains a dedicatory poem and a list of characters. Among the earliest Italian operas to be performed in Germany was Antonio Bertali's L'inganno d'amore (1653, Regensburg): Benedetto Ferrari's libretto, printed in Italian, includes a synopsis in German and is embellished with seven engraved scene designs by Giovanni Burnacini, the pioneer of Venetian theatrical machinery. Burnacini's earlier designs for La Gara, text by Alberto Vimina, had also been published in the same manner (Vienna, 1652). This was a libretto of the commemorative type, published after the performance; it included a description of each act and an account of the impression made by the spectacle. Burnacini's son, Ludovico, worked principally in Vienna, where nine librettos between 1661 and 1700 carried engravings of his scene designs, including Cesti's Il pomo d'oro (1668) and Draghi's Il fuoco eterno (1674). Viennese 17th-century librettos tended to follow the Italian models and usually named the librettist, composer and machinist but not the singers. German librettos did not always name even the librettist, and rarely the composer. That for Handel's first opera, Almira (published in Hamburg, 1704), gives no names at all but lists in the preliminaries the dances and scenes. The arias are in German and Italian, a German translation being provided for the latter. Later in the 18th century and early in the 19th the participants are sometimes named in both German and Viennese librettos, and translations into German often given for foreign-language texts. Three editions of Gluck's Orfeo (Vienna, 1762) were published at about the time of the première – one with Italian and French text, one with German and one with Italian only; all three name the singers. The first printing of Idomeneo (Munich, 1781) names the composer, librettist, translator and also the singers (the only libretto of one of Mozart's major operas to name them); it has an argomento and list of scenes, and a German translation faces the Italian text. The second edition, which reflects the changes made in the rehearsals for the original production (see Mozart's letters to his father in early 1781), has Italian text only. There are exceptions, but in general the German and Viennese libretto from about 1750 is sadly uninformative, usually having a list of characters (‘Personen’) but no other preliminaries. The 1805 Vienna libretto of Fidelio provides an example of this, while Weber's Der Freischütz (Berlin, c1821) names the singers but, in common with many other German librettos, contains the text of only the ‘Arien und Gesänge’.
The first opera produced in France was Luigi Rossi's Orfeo, to a text by F. Buti; an abrégé in French was published but not a libretto. The first French libretto was probably Buti's text for Carlo Caproli's Le nozze di Peleo e di Theti (1654, Paris); this was published with dual Italian and French texts and named the singers. In the same year an English translation, The Nuptials of Peleus and Thetis, was published in London – probably the earliest libretto to be published in England, though no performance was given. The librettos of the first French opera, Michel de La Guerre's Le triomphe de l'amour, text by C. de Beys, and that of Cambert's Pomone, which inaugurated the Paris Opéra, were published at the end of 1654 and in 1671 respectively. In 1672 the first of Lully's operas was given. The original editions of his librettos are quartos and many have an engraved frontispiece depicting a scene from the work. In most of them the names of the singers and dancers, and sometimes also the leading instrumentalists, are given before the prologue and first act (fig.2); further names are occasionally inserted at points within the text. For works produced at the Opéra the quarto format was maintained throughout the 18th century, after which the octavo format used by the other Paris theatres was adopted. From the 1720s comic operas appeared in a new type of publication that was to become popular in England with the advent of ballad opera: the music of some or all of the airs, though usually only the melodic lines, was printed within or as a supplement to the libretto. This format was continued, principally by the publisher Duchesne, in librettos of many comic operas and parodies from the 1730s to the 1770s, especially those of C.-S. Favart. Until the late 1820s publishers issued librettos in plain wrappers; thenceforward printed wrappers were gradually adopted and frequently carried advertisements.
In England the early librettos were usually quartos, similar to the contemporary playbooks. The libretto for the first English opera, William Davenant's The Siege of Rhodes, music by Matthew Locke and others, is particularly informative: it names the place of performance, the singers, the composers of each entry and of the instrumental music, and it gives precise descriptions of the scenery and includes an address from Davenant to the reader. Other pre-1700 librettos normally have a dedication or preface but do not name the singers, though publisher's advertisements are sometimes included.
From the beginning of the 18th century the normal format changed to small quarto or octavo. From this period English librettos invariably name the composer, librettist, singers and dancers and often include a preface or dedication. Arsinoe (1705) has a preface by the composer, Thomas Clayton, in which he defines his aims in introducing the Italian manner to the English stage. The libretto of Handel's first London opera, Rinaldo (1711), has the Dedication, Preface and Argument in English, Giacomo Rossi's address to the reader in Italian and Aaron Hill's English translation of the text facing Rossi's Italian original; the printing of dual texts became routine for most operas performed in a foreign language in London until about the end of the 19th century. In 1728 the libretto of The Beggar's Opera was published in two octavo editions, the first having the melodic lines of the airs printed as a supplement, the second having them interspersed with the text, preceded by the overture in score. This remained the standard format in which the early ballad operas appeared (the tunes usually being printed from woodcuts).
Innovations later in the 18th century include the occasional provision of a frontispiece depicting a singer or a scene from the production, while an abridged form of libretto was introduced for some English-language operas, in which the text of only the vocal numbers was printed and the spoken dialogue omitted. An early example, for Der Freischütz at Drury Lane in 1824 (published retrospectively in the series Dolby's British Theatre, 1825), includes six pages of ‘critical remarks’ on the music, a description of the costumes, and stage directions supplied by the editors ‘from their own personal observations, during the most recent performances’. An advertisement for further titles in the series appears on the printed wrappers (introduced in the 1820s). From the late 1840s Covent Garden librettos often include a full list of the orchestra and give the name of the conductor. In the 1850s Davidson's began a series of ‘Musical Libretto-Books’ in which the original and English texts were printed in double column and ‘the music of the principal airs’ interspersed; some of Davidson's librettos have extensive prefaces commenting on the history of the opera and previous productions. By the 1860s it is not uncommon to find advertisements for miscellaneous goods and services printed on the wrappers and on several pages at the front and back of the libretto itself.
During the 20th century the libretto became associated with publishers and recording companies rather than with opera houses, although very occasionally an opera programme printed the complete libretto (particularly for a concert performance, when a translation was normally included). Most opera publishers still issue librettos, for both new and repertory operas, printed on better paper and in thicker wrappers than formerly; their contents are generally confined to normal title-page information, copyright claims, a list of the characters and scenes, a statement of the place and date of the first performance, possibly a preface and synopsis, the text itself, and advertisements for other publications. Boxed sets of gramophone records normally contained a booklet (up to 30·5 cm square) that included the text, often in several (usually four) languages, laid out in columns; the same procedure is usually followed for the booklets (12·5 × 14·5 cm) that accompany compact discs.
A number of private individuals and institutions have assembled significant collections of librettos. The most internationally representative is probably that formed by Albert Schatz, now in the Library of Congress, Washington; other particularly fine collections are those of the British Library, London, the Manoel de Carvalhoes collection at the Accademia di S Cecilia, Rome, and the Ulderico Rolandi collection at the Fondazione Cini, Venice. Further extensive collections are at the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich, the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, the Biblioteca Marciana, Venice, the Central Library of the Mariinsky Theatre at St Petersburg, the New York Public Library, the university libraries of California (at Berkeley) and Texas (at Austin), and the conservatory libraries of Bologna, Brussels, Milan, Naples and Paris. The best-known catalogues of librettos are O.G.T. Sonneck's Library of Congress: Catalogue of Opera Librettos Printed before 1800 (Washington DC, 1914), a monumental work, extensively annotated, in which librettos are listed by title, librettist and composer, and Claudio Sartori's I libretti italiani a stampa dalle origini al 1800 (Cuneo, 1990–95), which lists all Italian and Latin libretto texts published up to and including 1800 and states the location of copies worldwide; 16 indexes are provided.
The importance of librettos not only as texts but as documentary evidence of multifarious aspects of operatic history has now come to be fully appreciated and has in recent years inspired a major bibliographical undertaking known as the US RISM Libretto Project, with its seat at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. The object is to coordinate the cataloguing in machine-readable form of all historical librettos in collections in the USA, beginning with the Schatz Collection. The records (which are entered into the Research Libraries Information Network, where they are accessible as work proceeds) include not only the standard bibliographic descriptions but the indexing of all performance and production personnel named in the source, the names of the characters and the city and theatre of production.
AllacciD
Grove6 (E.J. Dent, P.J. Smith)
GroveO (R. Macnutt) [incl. further bibliography]
LoewenbergA
MGG1 (A.A. Abert)
SartoriL
SolertiMBD
StiegerO
StrunkSR1
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V. Raeli: ‘Catalogazione statistica delle collezioni di libretti per musica’, Musica d'oggi, xii (1930), 356–8
F. Biach-Schiffmann: Giovanni und Ludovico Burnacini: Theater und Feste am Wiener Hofe (Vienna and Berlin, 1931)
U. Rolandi: Il libretto per musica attraverso i tempi (Rome, 1951)
S.T. Worsthorne: Venetian Opera in the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1954/R)
U. Manferrari: Dizionario universale delle opere melodrammatiche (Florence, 1954–5)
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A. Caselli: Catalogo delle opere liriche pubblicate in Italia (Florence, 1969)
P.E. Gossett: The Operas of Rossini: Problems of Textual Criticism in Nineteenth-Century Opera (diss., Princeton U., 1970)
P.J. Smith: The Tenth Muse: a Historical Study of the Opera Libretto (New York, 1970)
A.C. Ramelli: Libretti e librettisti (Milan, 1973)
M. Chusid: A Catalog of Verdi's Operas (Hackensack, NJ, 1974)
R.L. and N.W. Weaver: A Chronology of Music in the Florentine Theater 1590–1750 (Detroit, 1978)
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