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And when you consider that this sort of thing happens not once but a dozen times between the start of a musical comedy book and its completion, can you wonder that this branch of writing is included among the dangerous trades and that librettists always end by picking at the coverlet? Then there is the question of cast.
The duration and climax of Auber's musical career were founded on his friendship and, artistic alliance with Scribe, one of the most fertile librettists and playwrights of modern times.
Composers and librettists express what they feel without regard to an alto singer who has no high C or a soprano who has no low A flat or G. But the artist will always find what he needs. Registers exist in the voices of almost all singers, but they ought not to be heard, ought not, indeed, to exist.
MM. Michel Carre and Jules Barbier, who made the book for Gounod's opera "Faust," went for their subject to Goethe's dramatic poem. Out of that great work, which had occupied the mind of the German poet for an ordinary lifetime, the French librettists extracted the romance which sufficed them the story of Gretchen's love for the rejuvenated philosopher, her seduction and death.
"You've lost your soul," they told him. "And now you haven't even success." But later, when he took up his pen again, he gave us two masterpieces in Esther and Athalie. Rossini was accustomed to success and it was hard for him to run into a half-hearted success when he knew he had surpassed himself. This was doubtless due to the extravagant phraseology of Hippolyte Bis, one of the librettists.
Frank Tinney and Al Jolson can, in their humble way, efface memories of Digby Bell and Dan Daly. Irving Berlin, Louis A. Hirsch, and Jerome Kern are not to be sniffed at. Neither is P. G. Wodehouse. Harry B. Smith we have always with us: he is the Sarah Bernhardt of librettists. Joseph Urban has wrought a revolution in stage settings for this form of entertainment.
It was impossible to weave a connected story from Murger's famous novel. Puccini's librettists attempted nothing of the kind. They took four scenes each complete in itself and put them before the audience without any pretence of a connecting thread of interest.
Like all musical directors he had in his leisure moments composed the complete score of a musical play and spent much of his time waylaying librettists on the Rialto and trying to lure them to his apartment to listen to it, with a view to business.
You will admit, I think, at first glance, the superior literary quality of these lines; you will perceive at once to what immeasurably higher class of art they belong than the lyrics that librettists forge for us today.
For a long time the subjects of Italian operas were taken solely from classical legend, and though in time librettists were compelled to have recourse to the medieval romances, they never ventured out of an antiquity more or less remote.
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