‘Librettology’ has begun to acquire a working vocabulary. Critics now investigate the relationship between a libretto and its literary source in terms other than fidelity; a text adapted for musical setting no longer disappears from the realm of the ‘literary’. Historians and musicologists are considering the role of opera librettos in cultural history, with special attention to librettos that rework historical, national or mythic themes. How operatic texts transpose and thus ‘re-accent’ a nation's literary classics is emerging as a fruitful and still unexplored field.

Towards the end of a life spent meditating on music, philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch wrote that ‘music is the silence of words, just as poetry is the silence of prose’. With this lapidary remark, he bottled up essences of French symbolist musical doctrines, their elevation of music above language, their impulse to urge poetry towards the condition of musical sound, and their sense that music is ineffable. ‘And the ineffable’, Jankélévitch wrote, ‘cannot be expressed because there are infinite and interminable things to be said of it’. Denying that music was inarticulate – that what it invokes is indicible, unable to be said – he saw instead a hall of sonorous mirrors, saturated with implications and suggestions diat draw the mind on to a vanishing point that can never be reached. Music has the perfect apparitional quality that others would deem characteristic of symbols per se, as that which materialises in the distance and cannot be caught when we journey towards its meaning: it will always recede, leaving us with our glowing trail of assumed connotations. Thus symbolist literature, with its rhapsodies to musical mystery, dealt profitably in poetic images of suggestive but unimaginable sound. Such sounds have their most famous incarnation in the melody of Mallarmé's faun's flute, repository for all that cannot be thought, said or remembered. Mallarme created a poetic symbol, verbally couched, which as symbol per se borrows the ineffability of music. It is a mirage, which we approach and lose even as we imagine its meaning. By choosing a musical object (a flute melody), Mallarmé drew doubly on music's apparitional quality — as if to say: even if the impossible could occur and we were to grasp the symbol and its single luminous meaning, hearing what the flute plays, that sound, like all music, would merely send us wandering onwards again.

The age of Louis XIV was an age of contrasts. It was fond of spectacle and ostentation, typified in the great fêtes of Versailles, yet it is rightly known as ‘l'époque classique’, characterised by order and decorum. Its greatest playwright was Jean Racine, whose eleven tragedies had only the barest of sets, presented one action in one place during a maximum of twenty-four hours, chose subjects from history or mythology that featured only mortal characters in easily believable situations, relegated violence and other unseemly behaviour to the wings and to descriptions (récits), and used a limited, noble vocabulary to explore the depths of the human condition and to create poetry of extraordinary beauty. However, in 1673, during the peak of Racine's career, Quinault and Lully created French opera (tragédie lyrique), which, while also using a limited, noble vocabulary, featured spectacular sets and costumes for each act, allowed subplots (even comic ones in the first three operas), staged battles, storms and divine interventions, eschewed historical characters, and presented simpler situations and characterisations in order to leave time for music and dance.

Among the more remarkable events of recent intellectual history is that Edward Said, famous avant-garde literary critic, passionate advocate for the Palestinian cause, has begun to write about music. Moreover, not just about any kind of music, but about classical music in the élite (and canonical) European tradition – the symphonies of Beethoven, the operas of Wagner, the chamber music of Schubert and Brahms. Several years ago Said took over the music column in The Nation magazine, and more recently he has published a book, Musical Elaborations, based on a series of invited lectures at the University of California at Irvine.

Theodor Adorno thought Parsifal unique, in many respects incongruous when compared with Wagner's earlier operas and music dramas. In a 1956 essay, ‘Zur Partitur des Parsifal’ (‘Concerning the Score of Parsifal’), he noted the ‘continually strange newness’ of Wagner's last work, concluding: ‘From out of the waning of his original inventive powers, Wagner's force produces the virtue of a late style; a style that, according to Goethe's dictum, withdraws from appearance’. More recently, Werner Breig paused appreciatively over Adorno's remark about the ‘continually strange newness’, but pursued a different argument. Breig claims that Parsifal was recapitulatory, stylistically homogeneous with the earlier works, and he is supported by Wagner's assertion to Cosima that he had written ‘nothing new’ since Tristan (CWD II, 26 March 1879), a conviction redolent of one the composer had earlier expressed (albeit in entirely different circumstances) in a letter to Mathilde Wesendonck of 2 May 1860: ‘I can now only repeat myself … I have no other significant characteristics to offer’. Breig summarises his position in the Wagner Handbook: ‘The musical structure of Parsifal contains no fundamentally new elements, but rather follows directly upon the achievements of the Ring and Tristan’, thus nodding to the Wagner who cheerfully confessed having ‘take[n] up the old paint pot’ of the Tristan style for Act II of Parsifal (CWD II, 5 April 1878).

In my review of Frederic Spotts' Bajreuth: A History of the Wagner Festival (this journal, 7 [1995], 277–84), differing editions of a key text led me to claim that many more citations were incorrect than was actually the case. Although diis does not affect my basic point about the inadequacy of the citation style in general, I apologise to Dr Spotts for the confusion.

The libretto for a tragèdie en musique might be regarded as a tabula rasa. Whereas an Italian dramma per musica generally differentiates between recitative poetry and aria poetry — versi sciolti on the one hand, strophic versi misurati on the other — its French counterpart contains page after page of supple vers libres, which lend themselves to a great variety of musical shapes. Indeed, apart from a few highly conventional gestures, one cannot necessarily tell simply by looking at the libretto how a tragédie en musique will have been set. The point might be illustrated by an example, a pair of invocations sung by Phèdre in Jean-Philippe Rameau's Hippolyte et Aricie (1733); one of them is a single quatrain, and the other consists of eight lines divided by their rhyme scheme into two quatrains. The columns at the left show the length of the vers (with + indicating feminine rhyme) and the rhyme scheme:

The pre-history of a nineteenth-century composer's first opera often required labours more arduous and frustrating, more time-consuming by far, than the work of composition itself: the search for a suitable libretto or the source from which a libretto could be fashioned. The chronicle of Beethoven's travails before work on his Schmerzenskind could begin, his rejection of plays and poets both before and after the Bouilly-Sonnleithner text of Fidelio, is not the only instance of its kind. Later composers with operatic ambitions and without a court-sponsored coterie of librettisti had an even harder time. The difficulty of locating a good text was not the only or even the principal reason for Brahms's famous quip, ‘Better to marry than to write opera’, but it was certainly a contributing factor and a stumbling block for others. For those who, unlike Wagner, did not trust their own poetic skills, the doleful refrain, ‘A good poet is hard to find’, was a leitmotif more insistent than anything in the Ring.

It has become commonplace to assume that language and style in Italian opera are not a unified phenomenon, easily comparable with the language and style of a purely musical work. Rather they constitute the various elements of a plurilinguistic interplay in which the opposite pole from ‘the author’ is the characters: those figures whose personality, function and social condition command an individual musical language. Musical expression is determined by an interaction of the author's discourse with the fictive discourse of characters; even when one or the other seems to dominate, there remains an important, implicitly dialogic element, one that can sometimes be inferred solely from a sense of discordant context. In many instances, therefore, operatic discourse suggests analogies with the ‘dialogic’ nature of the modern novel posited by the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin.

Opera is rich in works that construct visions of the non-Western world and its inhabitants: Rameau's Les Indes galantes, Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Bizet's Les Pêcheurs de perles, Verdi's Aida, Strauss's Salome, Puccini's Turandot. In these operas the representation of what recent critical theory calls ‘the Other’ is most clearly announced in the basic plot, in characters' names, and in costumes, sets and props. But to what extent do the libretto and the music also participate in this project?

The question easily lends itself to a narrower formulation: to what extent do these operas signal Otherness – Turkishness, Indianness, Chineseness and so on – through musical materials that depart from Western stylistic norms or even reflect specific musical practices of the region in question? Scholars and critics have repeatedly posed the problem in these terms, only to find themselves frustrated by three limitations: general stylistic aberrations are often applied indiscriminately by composers to vastly different geographical settings; borrowed tunes and the like tend to lose distinctive features by being uprooted and transplanted; and whole stretches of these operas are written in an entirely Western idiom.