Dana Gioia: preference

Transcript context

…What is the most difficult or most scarce skill in writing opera librettos? Taking it seriously. I can’t tell you how bad most contemporary libretti are because there’s this assumption which is that you write something and the composer does all the work. That’s not true. An opera needs to be as well written as a broadway musical. If you go to a broadway musical, if you go to a Cole Porter musical or Stephen Sondheim musical, much of the pleasure is in the language. I’ve had this experience again and again when they produce the operas I’ve written the libretti for, the singers come up to me and they go, “Your lyrics are so good.” What does that mean? I think it means this. When I was writing a poem for the page, all it had to do was to work on the page. When I write lyrics for an opera libretto, it has to work as a poem, it has to work as something that the composer can set to music, which means it has to be tight enough to have a form but not so tight that the composer can’t get into it. There’s a third thing that I had never considered. The singer has to become your words for the duration of the performance. When the soprano walks on, she has to know who she is, who she was, what she wants, she has to inhabit your words. That’s what I think I got to be very good at, creating beautiful language that a singer could inhabit in the way that they can inhabit a great pop song. What do you think of the libretto for Jerome Kern’s Show Boat?…

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