Weep, Shudder, Die: On Opera and Poetry

With this idiosyncratic and impassioned ode to the libretto, poet Gioia (Meet Me at the Lighthouse) aims to upend the “assumption that in opera words hardly matter.” On the contrary, he argues, opera’s compressed narrative structure means that lyrics function as a “driving force,” drawing out “peak moments of human emotion” and allowing for “emotional transference” between performers and audience. Exploring the relationship between text and music, Gioia argues that seamless collaboration between composers and librettists has produced some of opera’s most spectacular works, from Wolfgang Mozart and Venetian poet Lorenzo Da Ponte’s Don Giovanni (Da Ponte contributed “a comic sophistication and thematic complexity” that elevated the opera “beyond [Mozart’s] earlier theatrical works”) to Ira and George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. Gioia’s at his most convincing when he’s affectionately analyzing the form’s particularities, including the unabashed emotion with which it captures the “extremes of human existence” (“No one suffers silently in opera”). Other sections find him lost in the weeds, as when he spends several pages chiding critics who question the “operatic status” of Steven Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd. Still, opera aficionados will find plenty to appreciate. (Dec.)