| Operas
are known by their composers, famous arias they contain,
and well loved singers who’ve starred in them. Librettists
are for the most part ignored, because audiences, concentrating
on voices and, if moderately sophisticated, the action, hardly
wonder whose ideas underlie what they see and hear. But they
are there, the Da Pontes and Boitos who gave The
Marriage of Figaro to Mozart and Falstaff to Verdi.
The famous situations of Europe’s operatic tradition
had to be created before music could be found for them. This
collection of eighteen librettos sets out to create a new
and different tradition, suitable for a populist, indeed
revisionist age, able to see the great tradition in an altered
way, and then to turn it into something else. Love
in the Age of Wings,
which gives the collection its title, was written first,
and after that came all the others … |
