Setting words to music
A look at the world of libretto writing and a new wave of librettists
When Floria sings “Vissi d’arte, vissi d’amore” (I have lived for art, I have lived for love) in the second act of Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca, audiences swoon — but they rarely remember librettist Giuseppe Giacosa, the man responsible for some of the most emotionally charged words in the repertoire.
And as it was in 1900, so it is 2018: while singers, directors and composers are opera’s stars, librettists are still often overlooked. Which is why opera maker and director Ruth Mariner (Guildhall alumna, Opera Making and Writing 2014) decided something had to be done. Last year, she founded the Librettist Network in association with Guildhall School — a new way to make librettists more visible, more vocal and, vitally, to give them a new way to connect.
The Network now numbers more than 340 members and aims to “develop the craft of libretto writing, raise the status of librettists, find new voices within opera and develop new work”. Perhaps unsurprisingly for a profession where economy of expression is prized, Twitter — @LibrettistNet — has proved the perfect medium. It has certainly launched at the right moment.
Opera is on the crest of a wave of creativity, reinvention and youth. And for Mariner, who was part of the first cohort to be accepted on to Guildhall’s MA in Opera Making and Writing, much of that activity is focused on getting out and about.
“There is a group of mainly young people working today who see opera as a creative resource, and as a way of making work rather than as a tradition,” she says. “It still needs a massive public engagement campaign to be seen as public-facing, and if there’s anyone that can do that it’s our generation. But we really need the help of the people within the industry to nurture and encourage us.”
Since graduation, Mariner, along with her company, Gestalt Arts, has taken operatic work to places and audiences well beyond its traditional confines. So far, just this year, projects have included The Unsung Heroes of the Planet, the first opera to be performed in the Eden Project biomes; A Shoe Full of Stars, a community opera in Huddersfield exploring young people’s reactions to terrorism; and Refuge in Harmony, a work in collaboration with the British Red Cross that brings the real experiences of 40 unaccompanied child refugees to the stage at Opera Holland Park. For her, being a librettist means “you have to create a skeleton that answers artistic questions, most important of which is, ‘What do you want this piece to do in the world?’”
For Stephen Plaice, Professor of Dramatic Writing, this has been one of the great gifts of the Opera Making and Writing course. As he welcomes the fifth cohort, of three librettists and three composers, he points proudly to “the number of productions that our students have gone on to be involved in. The majority continue to work in opera, to make operas in many different contexts — educational, environmental and site-specific, as well as chamber works. Once encountered, many admit, opera becomes their main preoccupation.”
One of those increasingly preoccupied with opera is lawyer-turned-librettist Oge Nwosu (Guildhall alumna, Opera Making and Writing 2017), who confesses that she had begun to find herself increasingly drawn to an art form where “singing life” is the norm “even though it seemed such a ridiculous thing to do”.
Nwosu was already an accomplished fiction writer: a performance of the chamber opera, Powder Her Face, with libretto by Philip Hensher and music by Thomas Ades, sealed the deal for her. “It was a kind of awakening. I was fascinated, and thrilled and amazed. It seemed so fresh and exciting.”
For director and writer Gareth Mattey (Guildhall alumnus, Opera Making and Writing 2018) it was a live screening of the Alice Goodman/John Adams piece Nixon in China that opened the door to opera. “I thought I was going to see a history programme,” Mattey laughs. “Instead it showed me how opera could be both incredibly political and intensely strange.”
But despite their passion for the form — or perhaps because of it — both agree that the course has been tough. While there was no limit on their artistic ambition, they had to adapt to a ‘less is more’ approach. Six whole sheets of Mattey’s libretto disappeared between the first and second workshops, leaving “just one line that did the same thing”. Nwosu arrived at the same conclusion, but rather differently. She confesses that in the early months of the course, “I found it very scary and quite hard to make any words come at all. If I wrote three words and people said, ‘That’s fine’, I didn’t dare write a fourth in case I spoilt it!”
But asked which librettists make the words sing for them, the answers come thick and fast. Plaice chooses Eric Crozier, who “understood how to blend poetic imagery with theatrical structure”, while Mariner admires the way “Martin Crimp can blend different worlds to give a palette of modern and more period writing very seamlessly. It’s very genuine and well-crafted.”
Although neither are librettists, Mattey says that Samuel Beckett and the “queer operatic aesthetic” of Derek Jarman have been particular influences. “Beckett is someone who very rarely wrote for music, but all his plays are based around such a clear sense of rhythmic structure. He creates theatrical worlds that are deliberately absurd, but which have a strong fascination with rhythm”.
Nwosu’s touchstone is Arbeit Nahrung Wohnung (Work Food Lodging), a backwards retelling of the Robinson Crusoe story by Marcel Beyer and Enno Poppe. Baritone and Guildhall alumnus Omar Ebrahim (Vocal Studies 1979) sang the part of Freitag in the piece, and told Nwosu that here “rather than words holding meaning, the music frees the meaning and allows the words to be all they can be”. This, she says, “is very much the sort of thing I aspire to achieve”.
Opera is not, everyone agrees, a play set to music. Nor should it ever try to be realistic. As Mattey points out, “part of the fascination exists in translating something political into something abstract and strange like opera”. Indeed, for Mattey, who as a queer artist closely identifies with the idea that the ‘personal is political’, says that the very act of making something sing is to “make it queer” — to make it striking , uncertain, different.
For Nwosu “the course has done something magnificent. It has electrified opera making … I think there will be even more very small-scale, intimate opera. I see myself trying to make a sort of opera that I haven’t actually found yet.” She will soon begin a PhD at Guildhall, under Plaice’s supervision. Describing her research proposal as “a manifesto”, Nwosu’s starting point is a question: “What would happen if a librettist wrote exactly what they wanted to write?” The page, and stage, is waiting for the answer.
This article first featured in the Autumn/Winter 2018 edition of the Guildhall magazine, PLAY, and was written by YBM for the Guildhall School of Music & Drama.
