Libretti publications -- E.N.O. guides; others?

[darkehmen]

One thing that's always surprised me about opera is how little there is in the way of scholarly editions of libretti. True, the libretti are often included as bare-bones dialogue lists accompanying opera recordings, but those are hardly very edifying.

The best libretti publications I've found to date are the English National Opera guides. 48 operas (the main Mozart, Wagner, Verdi, and Puccini operas, along with a few surprises) have been published in this series, of which a list appears here

www.wagner-nsw.org.au/events/enoguides05.html

Here are two of them:

Der fliegende Hollaender:
www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0714539201/

Die Meistersinger:
www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0714539619/

Besides the text of the libretto in English side-by-side with the original language, each edition features three scholarly essays about the particular work, covering its background and origin, literary themes, performance histories, and musical content.

Their best features are the many b&w photographs that they include from performances of the operas throughout the years. It's a wonderful way to discover how well these works were once performed (sad as it is to see the pictures of modern performances).

With these pictures of the historical performances in mind, as one listens to an opera one can conceive of a whole staging along traditional lines.

Does anyone know of any other similarly helpful (or superior) publications of opera libretti?

[K620]

In English I don't know anything better than the ENO guides.

In French, however, there's a really stunning series, L'Avant-Scène Opéra. Libretto, French translation, detailed commentary on the music & text (printed on the same pages as the libretto & translation), lots of essays, critical discography, critical videography (in the more recent issues), etc. And lots of photos from hideous productions of the opera, showing us just how lucky we are not to have seen them.

Some of the essays are by very distinguished people indeed. The volume on Mozart's Figaro has Lisa della Casa on the Countess, Lucia Popp on all three female principals, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau on the Count, and José van Dam on the title role. The discussions of audio & video recordings are often (not always) extremely comprehensive, reviewing unreleased things as well as readily available ones. The videographies are highly valuable as sources of factual information, but the authors' tastes tend to be slightly different from mine -- they tend to be very scathing of old-fashioned "unimaginative" traditionalist productions by the likes of Karajan, Schenk, Hampe etc.

In some cases, older out-of-print L'Avant-Scène Opéra volumes are superior to those currently on sale. Un Ballo in maschera used to have fascinating essays on Riccardo & Amelia by Carreras & Ricciarelli respectively (much more insightful than those singers' filmed performances in the roles might lead you to expect). Even better, the detailed musical commentary in the Simon Boccanegra volume used to be provided by Abbado (the conductor of the classic Strehler/La Scala production on CD and DVD). Those items have now been replaced. I suppose the publication rights ran out, or the royalties could no longer be afforded -- I can't imagine any other reason for replacing them. But cheap secondhand copies of the old editions can usually be found through Chapitre, Alapage, or even Abebooks.

Going back to English, Cambridge University Press has published some extremely useful volumes discussing individual operas, e.g. Lucy Beckett on Parsifal. However, those volumes don't contain either libretto or translation. Nowadays, of course, the actual libretto can usually be found on the internet (and in some cases translations thereof can also be found). Though internet texts are often disfigured with numerous misprints & accidental omissions (sometimes of a whole page or more).

Edit: Thinking it over, I believe I once heard or read somewhere that the ENO Guides were modelled on the L'Avant-Scène Opéra series. The AS Opera volumes are more lavish and contain much more material, but the basic format is fairly similar.

[darkehmen]

k620 said:

And lots of photos from hideous productions of the opera, showing us just how lucky we are not to have seen them.

So true.

Thank you for confirming that there isn't anything better on offer than the ENO guides in English. Pity about the French guides that you mention, though. If at least they showed images of historical productions, I would consider looking into them, despite having no working knowledge of French. (The historical images in the ENO guides are arguably their best features.) But books full of pictures of modern Eurotrash (or worse, wannabe modern Eurotrash) I can do without.