Monteverdi was, at least initially, much taken with the potential of the plot, and the opportunities the libretto provided for a variety of musical effects.
But this is still an effective evening in the theatre: Thulani Davis's libretto provides revealing contrasts not only between black and white characters but between the mere mortals and the African deities who hover over the scene, all helped by Sam Helfrich's deft direction, which places this mythic story within a jarring contemporary context.
Although not a grand opera, the new libretto provided Sullivan with the opportunity to write his most ambitious score to date.
He envisaged the disappearance of the old type of opera, with its libretto provided by a hack versifier, as an opportunity for the composer to make a "set piece" opera out of purely musical forms separated by a recitative.
This libretto provided him with a string of opportunities to convey, through music of almost classical restraint and elegance, states of longing, anguish, fury and, a Rossini specialty, confusion.
The libretto was provided by Edoardo Sanguineti, who included elements of his 1956 poem Laborintus in it.
Weill then wrote the music and Brecht provided the libretto for Die Dreigroschenoper (1928; The Threepenny Opera), which was a transposition of John Gay's Beggar's Opera (1728) with the 18th-century thieves, highwaymen, jailers, and their women turned into typical characters in the Berlin underworld of the 1920s.
Literature provides the libretto for operas, the theme for tone poems even so anomalous a form as Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra was interpreted in music by Richard Strauss and of course it provides the lyrics of songs.
(The same author also provided the libretto for Shostakovich's "Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk").
A preconcert lecture by Tamara Levitz, the festival's scholar in residence, illuminated contradictory objectives among Stravinsky and his chief collaborators on "Persephone," the actress Ida Rubenstein, who commissioned the work, and the writer André Gide, who provided the libretto.
