Literaturoper

Literaturoper (''literature opera'', plural “Literaturopern”), a term coined by the German music critic Edgar Istel, describes a genre of opera that emerged during the late 19th century. When an existing play for the legitimate theatre is set to music without major changes and without the intervention of a librettist, a “Literaturoper” is the result. Although the term is German, it can be applied to any kind of opera, irrespective of style or language. (In that sense it can be regarded as a term rather than a genre as such.)

The former, much broader usage of the term “Literaturoper” for opera libretti on the basis of dramas, novels and short stories of undoubted literary renown, which was still common until around 1980, has been made obsolete by recent research on the history of the opera libretto. Since opera libretti have relied on subject matter from the history of literature since the very origin of the genre of opera, a broader usage of the term would cover the entire history of opera, regardless of the underlying libretto structure.

Current definition

According to a seminal publication by Peter Petersen, the term means „a special form of music theater in which the libretto is based on a literary work whose linguistic, semantic and aesthetic structure remains recognizable in the musical-dramatic work as a structural layer.“

History

The tradition of literaturoper only became established in European opera culture when, with Richard Wagner and the "through-composed dramatic form" he developed, the conventions of verse metrics for the opera libretto had faded. At the same time, the personal union of libretto poet and composer appeared as the new norm of opera production. Especially in the area of the Romance languages, the alliterating verse in Wagner's ''Ring des Nibelungen'' was perceived as prose text, since the use of alliteration as basis for the poetry in the Ancient Germanic languages had always been alien the syllable-counting verse systems in the French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese poetic tradition.

Since the production of literaturopern possessed the potential to make the function of the opera librettist redundant, the genre was first able to assert itself in those opera cultures in which professional libretto-writing had not been able to develop a centuries-long tradition (Russia, Germany). The first examples of this dramaturgical process can be found in the history of French and Russian music in the second half of the 19th century. Early Russian literaturopern include Alexander Dargomyzhsky’s opera '' The Stone Guest'' (after Alexander Pushkin) and Modest Mussorgsky’s opera fragment '' The Marriage'' and his '' Boris Godunov'' (also after Pushkin).

In French and Italian opera, which had possessed an established libretto tradition for centuries, the introduction of the literaturoper took place parallel to the discussions about the possibility of writing opera libretti in prose. Since the Italian tradition of operatic verse proved to be particularly resistant to the introduction of prose libretti, the first Italian literaturopern were created on the basis of Gabriele d'Annunzio’s verse dramas ( Alberto Franchetti, ''La figlia di Iorio'' (1906), Pietro Mascagni, ''Parisina'' (1913), Riccardo Zandonai, ''Francesca da Rimini'' (1914), Ildebrando Pizzetti, ''Fedra'' (1915).

The first composers to directly set plays include Charles Gounod,Hugh Macdonald: ''The Prose Libretto'', In: Cambridge Opera Journal 1, 1989, pp. 155–166. Pietro Mascagni, Claude Debussy, Richard Strauss and Alban Berg. After the Second World War, the genre flourished, especially in Germany, and composers often resorted to setting plays from previous centuries or from Greek Antiquity. The production of literary operas continues to this day.

Literaturopern based on plays

* Modest Musorgsky
** '' The Marriage'' after Alexander Pushkin's play, 1868 (unfinished)
** '' Boris Godunov'' after Alexander Pushkin's play, 1874
* Alexander Dargomyzhsky
** '' The Stone Guest'' (''Каменный гость'') after Alexander Pushkin's play of the same name, 1872
* Charles Gounod:
** ''George Dandin'', after the comedy George Dandin by Molière, unfinished (?), 1874
* Pietro Mascagni:
** ''Guglielmo Ratcliff'' after Heinrich Heine in the Italian translation by Andrea Maffei, 1895
** ''Parisina'' after Gabriele d’Annunzio, 1913
* Claude Debussy: '' Pelléas et Mélisande'' after Maurice Maeterlinck, 1902
* Richard Strauss:
** '' Salome'' after Oscar Wilde, 1905
** '' Elektra'' after Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 1909
* Alberto Franchetti:
** ''La figlia di Iorio'' after Gabriele d’Annunzio, 1906
* Nadia Boulanger / Raoul Pugno, '' La ville morte'' after the drama ''La città morta'' by Gabriele d’Annunzio, composed 1914, first performance 2008
* Riccardo Zandonai:
** '' Francesca da Rimini'' after Gabriele d’Annunzio, 1914
* Ildebrando Pizzetti:
** ''Gigliola '' after Gabriele d’Annunzio’s drama ''La fiaccola sotto il moggio'' (1914, unfinished)
** '' Fedra'' after Gabriele d’Annunzio, 1915
** ''La figlia di Iorio'' after Gabriele d’Annunzio, 1954
** '' Assassinio nella cattedrale'' after Thomas Stearns Eliot in der Übersetzung von Alberto Castelli, 1958
* Alexander von Zemlinsky: ''Eine florentinische Tragödie'' after Oscar Wilde, 1917
* Italo Montemezzi:
** ''La nave'' after Gabriele d’Annunzio, 1918
* Domenico Alaleona:
** ' after the tragedy by Vittorio Alfieri, 1920
* Sergei Prokofiev: ''The Love for Three Oranges'' after Carlo Gozzi’s fiaba teatrale L'amore delle tre melarance , 1921
* Darius Milhaud, ''Les Euménides'' after the drama ''The Eumenides'' by Aischylos, composed 1917–1922, performed 1949
* Paul Hindemith
** '' Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen'' after the drama '' Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen'' (1907) by Oskar Kokoschka, 1921
** ''Sancta Susanna'' after the drama ''Sancta Susanna'' (1913) by August Stramm, 1922
** ''The Long Christmas Dinner'' after the play ''The Long Christmas Dinner'' (1931) by Thornton Wilder, 1963
* Alban Berg:
** ''Wozzeck'' after Georg Büchner’s ''Woyzeck'', 1925
** ''Lulu'' after Frank Wedekind’s plays ''Erdgeist'' and ''Die Büchse der Pandora'' , 1937
* Manfred Gurlitt:
** ''Wozzeck'' after Georg Büchner’s ''Woyzeck'', 1926
** '' Soldaten'' after the drama Die Soldaten (Lenz) by Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz, 1930
* Arthur Honegger
** ''Antigone (Honegger)'' after Jean Cocteau, 1927
* Othmar Schoeck:
** Penthesilea after Heinrich von Kleist’s drama Penthesilea (Kleist) (1808), 1927
* Franco Alfano
** ''Cyrano de Bergerac'' after Edmond Rostand, 1936
* Bohuslav Martinů
** ''Julietta'' after the play ''Juliette, ou La clé des songes'' by Georges Neveux, 1935
** '' Mirandolina'' after Carlo Goldoni's 1751 comedy '' La locandiera'', 1959.
** '' Ariane'' after the play ''Le Voyage de Thésée'' ( 1943) by Georges Neveux, 1961
* Francis Poulenc:
** ''Les mamelles de Tirésias'' after Guillaume Apollinaire, 1941
** ''La voix humaine'' after Jean Cocteau, 1958
* Carl Orff:
** ''Antigonae'' after the drama by Sophokles in the German translation by Friedrich Hölderlin (1804), 1949
** ' after the drama by Sophokles in the German translation by Friedrich Hölderlin (1804), 1959
** ''Prometheus'' after the drama by Aischylos, 1968
* Werner Egk:
** ''Irische Legende'' after ''The Countess Cathleen'' by William Butler Yeats, 1955
** ''Der Revisor'' after the comedy ''The Government Inspector'' (''Ревизор'') by Nikolai Gogol, 1957
** ''Siebzehn Tage und vier Minuten'' after the comedy ''El mayor encanto, amor'' by Pedro Calderón de la Barca, 1966
* Wolfgang Fortner:
** ''Bluthochzeit'' after ''Bodas de sangre'' by Federico García Lorca, 1957
** ''In seinem Garten liebt Don Perlimplin Belisa'' after '' Amor de don Perlimplín con Belisa en su jardín'' by Federico García Lorca, 1962
** ''That Time'' after the play ''That Time'' by Samuel Beckett, 1967
* Benjamin Britten: '' A Midsummer Night's Dream'' after William Shakespeare, 1960
* Hans Werner Henze:
** ''Das Wundertheater'' after ''El retablo de las maravillas'' by Miguel de Cervantes, 1949
** ''König Hirsch'' after the „fiaba teatrale“ ''Il Re cervo'' (1762) by Carlo Gozzi, 1956
** '' Der Prinz von Homburg'' after the drama '' Prinz Friedrich von Homburg oder die Schlacht bei Fehrbellin'' by Heinrich von Kleist, 1960
** '' Die Bassariden'' after the drama Βάκχαι ''(The Bacchae)'' by Euripides, 1966
* Bernd Alois Zimmermann: ''Die Soldaten'' after the drama Die Soldaten (Lenz) by Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz, 1965
* Gottfried von Einem:
** ''Dantons Tod'' after the drama Dantons Tod by Georg Büchner, 1947
** ''Der Besuch der alten Dame'' after the tragicomedy ''Der Besuch der alten Dame'' by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, 1971
** ''Kabale und Liebe'' after the play '' Kabale und Liebe'' by Friedrich Schiller, 1976
* Boris Blacher:
** ''Romeo und Julia'' after the tragedy by William Shakespeare, 1950
** ''Preußisches Märchen'' after the comedy '' Der Hauptmann von Köpenick'' by Carl Zuckmayer, 1952
** ''Yvonne, Prinzessin von Burgund'' after Witold Gombrowicz, 1973
* Giselher Klebe:
** ''Die Räuber'' after the tragedy by Friedrich Schiller, 1957
** '' Die Ermordung Cäsars'' after '' Julius Caesar (play)'' by William Shakespeare, 1959
** ''Alkmene'' after ' by Heinrich von Kleist, 1961
** '' Figaro lässt sich scheiden'' after the comedy ''Figaro lässt sich scheiden'' by Ödön von Horváth, 1963
** '' Jacobowsky und der Oberst'' after the comedy ' by Franz Werfel, 1965
** ''Ein wahrer Held'' after ''The Playboy of the Western World'' by John Millington Synge, 1975
** '' Das Mädchen aus Domrémy'' after the drama '' Die Jungfrau von Orléans'' by Friedrich Schiller, 1976
** '' Der Jüngste Tag'' after Ödön von Horváth, 1980
* Hugo Weisgall:
** ''Six Characters in Search of an Author'' after the drama ''Six Characters in Search of an Author'' by Luigi Pirandello, 1959
* Sylvano Bussotti
** ''Lorenzaccio'' after the drama '' Lorenzaccio'' by Alfred de Musset, 1972
** ''Le Racine'' after the drama ''Phèdre'' by Jean Racine, 1980
** ''Fedra'' after the drama ''Phèdre'' by Jean Racine, 1988
** ''Tieste'' after the drama ''Thyestes'' by Lucius Annaeus Seneca, 2000
* Aribert Reimann:
** ''Ein Traumspiel'' after August Strindberg’s drama '' Ett drömspel'', 1964
** ''Melusine'' after Yvan Goll, 1970
** ''Lear'' after William Shakespeare’s drama ''King Lear'', 1978
** '' Die Gespenstersonate'' after August Strindberg’s drama '' Spöksonaten'', 1983
** '' Troades'' after the drama ''The Trojan Women'' by Euripides in the translation by Franz Werfel, 1985
** '' Das Schloß'' after Franz Kafka’s novel Das Schloß and its theatre version by Max Brod, 1991
** '' Bernarda Albas Haus'' after Federico García Lorca’s drama The House of Bernarda Alba, 2000
** ''Medea'' after the third part of Franz Grillparzer's trilogy ', 2010
** '' L'Invisible'' (after Maurice Maeterlinck's ''L'Intruse'', ''L'Intérieur'' and ''La Mort de Tintagiles''), 2017
* Wolfgang Rihm:
** ''Faust und Yorick'' nach Jean Tardieu, 1977
* Walter Steffens:
** Eli after the mystery play by Nelly Sachs, 1967
** ''Unter dem Milchwald'' after ''Under Milk Wood'' by Dylan Thomas, 1973
* Adriana Hölszky:
** ''Bremer Freiheit'' after Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1988
** ''Die Wände'' after the drama ''Les paravents'' by Jean Genet, 1995
* Michèle Reverdy, ''Le Précepteur'' after the play '' Der Hofmeister'' by Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz, 1990
* Michael Denhoff: ''Der Pelikan'' after August Strindberg, 1992
* Manfred Trojahn:
** ''Enrico'' after the drama ''Enrico IV'' by Luigi Pirandello, 1991
** ''Was ihr wollt'' after Shakespeare’s ''Twelfth Night,'' 1998
** ''Orest'' after the drama ''Orestes'' by Euripides, 2011
* Toshio Hosokawa
** ''Hanjo'' after the Nô-drama 班女 (''Hanjo'', 1955) by Yukio Mishima (三島 由紀夫) in a translation by Donald Keene, 2004
** ''Matsukaze'', after the Nô-drama 松風 (''Matsukaze'') by Zeami Motokiyo (世阿弥 元清), 2011
* Luca Francesconi, ''Quartet'' after the drama '' Quartett'' by Heiner Müller, 2011
* Marc-André Dalbavie

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