The Latest Look in Librettos

Boroson on Music

October 2014

The Latest Look in Librettos

By Warren Boroson

Opera librettos may seem passé in this era of supertitles and subtitles — and free opera translations available on the Internet.

    But librettos seem to be making a spirited comeback. Witness “George Bizet’s Carmen,” the latest edition of a “superlibretto” — a paperback published by The Metropolitan Opera and Amadeus Press. Earlier in this distinguished series: Mozart’s “Cosi Fan Tutte,” Puccini’s “La Boheme,” Puccini’s “Tosca,” and Mozart’s “Nozze di Figaro.” Each is $18.99.

    The new librettos are a huge improvement over the dull-as-dishwater librettos of old. They boast glossy paper, bright white color, big print with lots of space, and modern, colloquial language. And photographs of Met singers! From Emma Calvé in 1893, an early and much-praised Carmen, to Jonas Kaufmann in 2010, as Don José, along with a variety of other singers — including the great Rosa Ponselle, in 1936. (It was not a role right for her — and you can see and hear her sing it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_wmjUk234s

She flunked this Hollywood screen test — although she claimed that she was not engaged because she asked for too much money.)

   The libretto, 151 pages long, has — besides the original French and an English translation — a synopsis; notes on the opera  by William Berger; a program note by Hugh Macdonald (Bizet’s death in 1875, three months after the opening night, “is one of the cruelest ironies in the history of music”); and footnotes by Nico Castel. (“The word Toreador is a French fabrication. A bullfighter in Spanish is a torero.”)

    As a bonus, there’s a reproduction of a program for the opera’s Met premiere, on tour, at the Boston Theatre on Jan. 5, 1884. (The advertisements include one for a shop that dyes, cleans, and flattens ostrich feathers.)

    I wish there had been more about the story of the opera — a man’s pathological love for a free-spirited woman. There’s just the opposite in Verdi’s “Rigoletto” — a woman’s pathological love for a free-spirited rogue. But whereas Gilda sacrifices her life for the Duke, Don José in a rage murders Carmen. (Though, in a famous incident in an opera in Chicago, the Don José, objecting to how fast the conductor was playing, angrily stomped off the stage. The singer playing Carmen, after getting over her astonishment, had the good sense to grab the dagger Don José had dropped and pretend to kill herself.)