Tenth Muse: A Historical Study of the Opera Libretto

This lively volume of scholarship is the first critical history of the libretto, the first book about opera to focus on the words and their relationship to the music. It begins at the beginning of opera, in the early seventeenth century. It continues with such notable librettists as Lorenzo Da Ponte (Don Giovanni, The Marriage of Figaro), Eugéne Scribe, Emile Zola, Arrigo Boito (Otello, Falstaff), W. S. Gilbert, and—his own librettist—-Wagner, and arrives at our own century with Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Gertrude Stein, and Bertolt Brecht.
Writing about their lives, their works, their collaborations with the composers, Patrick J. Smith goes to the original sources of librettos, analyzes the shifting relationships (within opera) of drama, dance, words, and music, andillumines the essential contributions of libretto to opera. The effect is one of revelation: the
reader fully comprehends for the first time the roles played by the great Italian, French, German, and English librettists, and the germinative value of their theatrical works, without which we should not have had the repertoire, as we know it, of operatic works by the great composers from Monteverdi to Mozart, Rossini,
Verdi, and Richard Strauss.
The Tenth Muse is of the first importance to the serious opera lover and to the student of opera.