Strauss's interest in the play was aroused in 1902, when Anton Lindner, a minor Austrian poet, sent him a copy, together with a partly drafted libretto.
By Emerson Beauchamp The New Yorker, July 17 , 1965P. 68 (A Draft of a Libretto for Still Another Meaningful Musical by Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley).
After he had a completed a first draft of the libretto for "Doubt," Mr. Shanley went to see Mozart's "Nozze di Figaro" at the Metropolitan Opera.
In one draft of the libretto, she says, "If mindless destruction is smashing its way through the world, wild and defiant, who but you, violent Wotan, can bear the blame for the calamity?
Mr. Cesar lost everything but the stale clothes on his back, including his poetry, the books he collected on history and European royalty, and the first draft of his libretto for a political opera.
Wagner took 26 years from writing the first draft of a libretto in 1848 until he completed Götterdämmerung in 1874.
Wagner wrote a first draft of the libretto in 1845, and he had resolved to develop it during a visit he had made to Venice with the Wesendoncks in 1860, where he was inspired by Titian's painting The Assumption of the Virgin.
Of course, my and Melanie's ideas about the piece and the kind of story we wanted to tell have matured, but after many hours of conversation, thousands of emails, invaluable workshops and draft after draft after redraft of the libretto, I'm confident that we have achieved what we set out to from the very early stages of development.
When Tippett produced his detailed draft, Eliot advised the composer to write his own libretto, suggesting that his own superior poetry would either distract attention from the music, or otherwise would be "swallowed up by it".
