The Undervalued Art: A Defence of the Libretto

Campbell, Niall (2024) The Undervalued Art: A Defence of the Libretto. Doctoral thesis (PhD), The Royal Northern College of Music in collaboration with Manchester Metropolitan University.

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Abstract

In an essay from The Dyer’s Hand, W.H. Auden (1962) argued that a librettist should understand their role in the creation of an opera to be a supportive, if not submissive, one. They are to offer the composer a level of private inspiration that will set their own, larger work in progress. In later criticism, such as Patrick J. Smith’s The Tenth Muse (1970), we have an expanded and more holistic envisioning of the duty of the librettist: to be the one taking the wider view, encompassing all aspects of the words, drama, staging and thematic of the piece. In such a scenario, the larger creative onus falls to the librettist. Frustratingly, there is a generality prevalent in both positions, where neither engage properly with the mechanics and techniques of successful libretti. And, aside from the posturing of each outlook, there is a lack of interaction (typical of the field) with the direct choices faced by the librettist as they go about the creation of their work. A criticism that can also be labelled at more recent academic criticism. This thesis, blending a creative and theoretical approach, remedies this oversight by focusing its study on the direct choices faced by a librettist as they write for opera. As a means of fostering a better appreciation for the genre of libretti, there is an interaction with three main elements of the composition: 1) the first, and often overlooked, choice of the implications to a new libretto of the historical tradition it commits to; 2) a timely interrogation of how exactly the poetry of the libretto can be understood to stand as comparison to ‘proper’ poetry of the page; 3) by offering a case-study of my own creative project in relation to collaboration, to show how this relationship impacts the creative space of the librettist. As a means of bringing these ideas together, the last chapter of the thesis uses an autoethnographic methodology to represent how all such considerations played out in the composition of three individual libretti written over the course of this study. If libretti suffer from being misunderstood, then this thesis aims to lift the curtain and give a first-hand perspective on how the librettist might create in such a role. The research methodology for this thesis seeks to capitalise on the uniqueness of this creative-critical project, it being a live collaboration with a composer, to harmonise close-reading and historical studies (of pieces including W.H. Auden’s text for Igor Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress (1951) and the text for Alice Goodman’s 1987 collaboration with John Adams, Nixon in China) with an autoethnographic element, as a means of establishing a concrete position on the worthiness of the art of libretti-writing that goes beyond this one project and therefore can go some ways to bettering the understanding of this neglected art form.