Intro. [Recording date: December 19, 2024.]
Russ Roberts: Today is December 19th, 2024, and my guest is poet and author, Dana Gioia. This is Dana’s third appearance on EconTalk. He was last year in April of 2023 talking about poetry and death. Our topic for today is his latest book, Weep, Shudder, Die: On Opera and Poetry. Dana, welcome back to EconTalk.
Dana Gioia: It’s good to be seeing you again.
Russ Roberts: It’s great to see you as well.
Russ Roberts: This book is about two of my favorite things–and a few more–opera and poetry. But, we have to be honest: opera and poetry are not the most popular things among most Americans and many other people around the world. Why opera? What’s your love of opera, which comes through on most every page of this book?
Dana Gioia: Well, opera is one of the two or three arts in the world I most love. I mean, opera and poetry would be my top two, probably followed by novels or movies. But, I’ve loved opera in a curious and changing way ever since I was a kid. And, now that I’m an older man, I wanted to explore the ways in which I think opera is both loved and distrusted in culture. That it’s not merely appealing, but intoxicating to the people who love it; and it’s dismissed in really very curious ways.
And then, finally, I wanted to discuss the love-hate relationship that people who are opera aficionados feel where they somehow feel embarrassed by the words, the plots, the characters of these works, which make them weep and laugh.
Russ Roberts: I think a lot of people find opera a closed door. It’s usually sung in a foreign language–for, say, Americans, or depending where you are, somebody else. And as you say, it is melodramatic–would be the obvious single word that you would use to describe it. And, one of the beautiful things about your book is to explain why that is a feature and not a bug.
And especially the words. A lot of people will say, ‘Oh, the words don’t matter. It’s all about the singing and the music; and the words are just, like, a necessary nuisance.’ And you make an extraordinary case for the importance of the libretto. Explain what the libretto is and how the author of the libretto comes to collaborate with the composer of the music.
Dana Gioia: Well, I have written five opera libretti. And, in the process of seeing these operas produced, I have been interviewed by reporters with no training in the field, and it’s very interesting. The two questions they always ask me: ‘Is your opera in Italian?’ And, the other is, ‘What comes first, the words or the music?’
Now you can say that these are imbecilic questions–which indeed they are in one sense–but you can also say that they are illuminating questions and that I wanted to explain in this book the relationship between the words and the music. And, a libretto in Italian means a little book. And, when operas were produced in Italy in the 18th and 19th century, they would be brought to an opera house, and they would essentially be run long as the people liked them, and it would be the same people seeing it night after night because you bought a subscription to the opera house. You went to the opera house, and you were there every night.
And, people say, ‘Well, how could they watch the same opera again and again?’ And, I ask them, ‘Did you ever have a record that you bought that you played again and again?’ ‘Oh, that happens all the time,’ they tell me. Well, it’s the same thing. There are certain arts that are based on repetition, and the two most obvious ones are poetry and song. People like to hear the same poem again. That’s why Shakespeare’s plays, you can see them many more times than you can see a prose play; and why songs are kind of inexhaustible. In fact, people, they treasure the repetition.
So, opera is a form of poetic drama. I would say it is the most intense form of poetic drama. And, you say, ‘Well, it’s melodramatic.’ And, I would say, ‘Well, what does the word melodramatic mean?’ It means drama to melody. So, it is by its nature melodramatic. If you went to an opera and there was no melodrama there, it’d be rather dull listening.
So, I go back to the two things in this. One of my main messages is: Opera is not sophisticated. It’s very, very primitive. I mean, what could be more primitive than a person coming into a vast, dark theater and without amplification filling the whole hall with a trained human voice intoning a ritual text in a foreign language and enacting symbolic drama?
I mean, you’re going back to the beginnings of human culture of–and if you go back to Greek tragedy, I mean, we think of Greek tragedy as this poetic tragedy we study in college, but in performance, Greek tragedy was a song and dance show. The chorus sang and they danced, and the characters basically intoned. And, in fact, they had masks that allowed them to amplify their sound across the audience because they weren’t as well-trained as Italian singers. People had to develop a whole athletic routine to create opera singers.
And so, what we’re seeing in one sense is a highly sophisticated and cultured art form, but it’s also a very primal, primitive form of art that goes back to the origins of humanity.
Russ Roberts: I have to tell a story about–my daughter was, I don’t know, four or five, and somebody was producing Cinderella on TV [television]. And there’s different operatic versions of Cinderella. I think this was in Italian; maybe it was Rossini. I’m not sure. And, I said, ‘How do you like it?’ And, after five or 10 minutes, she said, ‘I like it a lot.’ She said, ‘But, why are they singing in Chinese?’ She knew it was a foreign language. For her, Chinese was, I guess was the quintessential foreign language.
But the other question which I want you to return to is: Okay, it’s melodramatic. It’s primitive, it’s primal. It gets into your guts in surprising ways. And, one of the great representations of this on screen is Pretty Woman when Richard Gere takes Julia Roberts to the opera and she weeps unexpectedly. She doesn’t know what she’s gotten herself into, and she’s overwhelmed. And of course, she doesn’t know what the words–I think they go to La Bohème–she doesn’t know what the words mean.
What’s the point of the words, Dana? What do we need them for? Let’s just have people bellow out, emotionally, songs, incredible music that captures the longing and yearning that makes opera so powerful, and the pathos?
Dana Gioia: Well, let me answer one of the imbecilic questions–not your question–but where they say, ‘What comes first, the music or the words?’ And, I said, ‘Well, it would be hard for a composer to write three hours of vocal music if he didn’t know what the characters were doing, what they were saying, what their relationships were.’ The words always come first.
And so, the first purpose of these–you [?] say, ‘Well, what is the purpose of this poetic text?’ The first purpose is to give the composer a dramatic play: to create poetry which evokes in the composer the ability to create melodies and dramatic situations and characters. So, that’s the first thing: so, no libretto, no opera.
And, in fact, one of the things that I noticed–I think this is the most original observation I make in the book–is that if you take the 100 most widely performed operas in the world–now this is from all the last 400 plus years across basically all of Western Europe and part of Asia–over half of those operas were written by seven creative teams. Now, what are the odds of that?
When it says–it’s something that we know from pop music; we know from Broadway; we know from Hollywood–certain creative teams produce better work than others. You get the right poet and the right composer together, and they have a catalytic effect on each other’s creativity.
The composers knew this. Bellini didn’t want to work with anybody but Romani. Romani hated him; and so he would pay Romani twice as much as Romani got from anybody else, because he said, ‘Romani’s verse creates melodies in me.’ My title is from Vincenzo Bellini, the one great Sicilian opera composer, who said, ‘The purpose of opera was to make the listener weep, shudder, and die through singing.’
Now, what’s a song? A song are words raised to the level of music. And so, the first purpose of the libretto is to inspire the composer to create a work. And it could be a five-hour opera, indeed, as some operas have been.
The second thing–this is not inconsiderable–the singers know what they’re singing. The words allow the singers to know exactly what Don Juan or Falstaff, or whatever, is thinking and saying and feeling every moment.
So, when Julia Roberts goes to the opera–now, I should point out one of the important messages of all of these opera films is that if you take a girl to the opera, you’ll end up in bed. And so, I think of Moonstruck and things like this. It’s the ultimate kind of emotional date. But see, the composer knows what the words mean. The composer knows what the plot and characters mean. The singers know what the words mean, what they are; and they can communicate a fantastic amount of the meaning in that way. Even if somebody doesn’t know a word of Russian–Russian is the hardest one for me. I love Russian operas, but I, except for about a dozen words, I don’t really know any Russian.
Now, the third thing is that the original audiences knew what the words meant. In fact, they liked the word so much they would buy a libretto so they could follow along. But, dare I say that nowadays everyone in the audience knows what the words mean? Why? The surtitles, the projected titles. This is perhaps Canada’s greatest contribution to world culture, is they created the surtitle–because they have a bilingual country. And so, now I think almost anybody who can read–I guess you have to be literate–can go to an opera and can follow it moment by moment and experience it as a literary drama.
But, I would maintain that even if you didn’t know what the words meant, because of the nature of words and the impact of the composer and the singers, you will feel the meaning of each scene.
Russ Roberts: So, I just want to tell a brief story. I’m sure there are many listeners–and some of them have maybe stopped listening already so I hope they’ll come back. But for those who are still with us and thinking, ‘Well, I’ve never really heard an opera I liked, and it doesn’t speak to me. The singing is very formal and shrieky and inaccessible.’ And, I felt that way through much of my life.
When I was about 25 years old, my dad, in desperation, disappointed that I had never really caught the bug, sent me a cassette of Madame Butterfly with Leontyne Price. And, he said, ‘Look, just listen to it for 20 minutes. Just give this 20 minutes.’
And, I would say the same thing to listeners who are thinking, ‘What’s all this fuss? I don’t like opera. It’s not for me.’ Put on Madame Butterfly–we’ll maybe make some other suggestions over the course of our conversation–but, first listen to it in the dark. Just close your eyes. This is very hard in 2024. We don’t do many things for 20 minutes without interruption.
But, I used to listen in the dark; and then I used to listen with the libretto. I would follow along. I was in my twenties, and I would listen to Faust by Gounod, La Bohème by Puccini, Madame Butterfly by Puccini, and I would follow along in the Italian/English libretto, which would be a parallel translation with the original so you could hear the singers with the words they were singing in Italian and then the words.
Watch Bergman’s movie, The Magic Flute. Try to listen to Don Giovanni by Mozart. Try La Traviata. And it’s–for the right person in the right point in their life, it is magical.
The thing that was shocking to me is–and one of the things that was shocking to me about your book which you’ve already mentioned–is this power of collaboration. And, the example that I think really brings it home is that Adler and Ross were a songwriting team on Broadway: They write The Pajama Game, which is a big hit. I don’t know it very well, but it’s a big hit. Then they write Damn Yankees, a musical I adore and has phenomenal songs–
Dana Gioia: A great musical–
Russ Roberts: Incredible songs, very powerful emotionally. It’s funny. It’s moving.
And, they never write another musical again. I never thought about why they didn’t. Well, the reason is that Jerry Ross died. It’s Jerry Ross who died, right?
Russ Roberts: Dies young.
Dana Gioia: And, he’s still in his twenties.
Russ Roberts: He’s 29. And he dies, I think, of leukemia. And, his partner, Adler–his songwriting partner–is a tremendous talent, obviously. But he never succeeds in finding a partner who can inspire him again, and at that level.
That’s unbelievable, and it illustrates the importance of collaboration. But it’s not a one-off. You give many examples of–you list the five most popular composers of operas. Many people will know these names: Puccini, Verdi, Mozart, Richard Strauss, and Richard Wagner. But, there are five equally prominent librettists–or seven–who also, they’re not famous, but they should be because many of the greatest operas, many of the greatest composers wrote one opera that was successful with one of these librettists and never wrote another successful one because they never worked with that person again.
Russ Roberts: That is just an incredible insight into the importance of collaboration in this art. And, put to the side the point that the composer gets all the glory and the librettist gets almost none: What your book points out is that the librettist should get a lot, and intellectually it changes the way you should think about what an opera is. It’s not just this beautiful music that somebody happened to put words to. It’s the other way around. Some poet inspired a composer to write the most beautiful music ever written.
Dana Gioia: Yeah. And the opera is not just lyrics. As Verdi said, ‘It’s situations.’ I mean, let’s go to, Damn Yankees–because people that don’t like opera won’t know this–“You’ve Got to Have Heart,” the situation of a team that’s always losing, that is basically advertising what they have, which is they got a lot of heart or, “Whatever Lola Wants, Lola Gets.” So, they create characters. They create situations. They create the words for those situations. And some people have a kind of genius for that.
Richard Strauss, who is really the last truly great operatic composer–maybe Benjamin Britten is–but when Strauss’ partner, Hugo von Hoffmannstahl dies–and he dies in his fifties, a terrible, terrible story. Von Hoffmannstahl–people in America don’t know him, but he created the Salzburg Festival, and he’s one of the great literary minds of Habsburg Vienna. His son commits suicide. As he’s going to the funeral, he has a heart attack and dies. So, it’s a terrible, terrible ending. And, Strauss did a whole bunch of operas, but he never wrote an opera that stuck since then.
But, I think it’s just–see, creativity is like athletics. It’s the person who is in the top 1% of the top 1% who is the great star. I mean, being in baseball and track or whatever, people win by a thousandth of a second in these competitions. And, there are some people who have the ability to bring out each other’s best performance.
And, there’s another thing, too, which is there are certain composers, certain creative teams that performers respond to, but I think that’s one of the great things about it. Let’s go back to Damn Yankees. What actress does not want to play Lola and sing, “Whatever Lola Wants, Lola Gets”?
People–I used to teach–financial desperation brought me to teach at USC [University of Southern California] each fall semester for nine years. Now, USC could not have been nicer to me. They created a Chair for me; but I tried to stay as far away from the English Department as I could, even though I’m a poet. But I taught singers in a class–I taught singers that were performing these things. And, you have all these sopranos, and they’re spending their lifetime so that they can be Mimi in La Bohème or Violetta in La Traviata. These are roles that they aspire to because when Violetta comes on the stage in La Traviata, she holds the audience in her hand from the moment she walks on to the moment she dies, and that’s the sort of–
Russ Roberts: The kind of [?mesmerizing?]–
Dana Gioia: Well yeah: the bad news here–
Russ Roberts: I’m laughing because they always die.
Dana Gioia: Yeah, in almost every tragic opera the heroine dies. But that’s why you pay the big bucks.
I mean, I’m interested that your dad got you into opera. And, I would make an even more radical claim. You and I, and probably most of the people listening to this, are university-trained. We probably have graduate degrees and we’ve been taught to do things right. But opera actually allows you to do things wrong. You can take a little three-minute aria or a five-minute aria from an opera–and you don’t even know the plot–you listen to it–without knowing the language–and it will have a stunning emotional impact on you. The beauty of it will overwhelm you. And, if it’s a sad song or a joyful song or a furious song, it will communicate it to you in this extraordinary way.
And, I think it’s because opera–and classical composers have forgotten this–the music departments, the conservatories of the world, don’t want to hear this next sentence: Opera is song. It’s elaborate song with all kinds of other things, but the heart of opera is song, and song is the oldest human art. Song is a universal art. You’ll not find any culture that doesn’t have song. In every culture, it has a sacred activity. In every culture, it has a magic activity. What a love song is, is something that woos your beloved: it creates love in them. And, if they don’t fall in love with you, they’ll at least feel sorry for you, so you get some impact. Magic are words that you change reality with.
Now, think of the word that the Romans used for ‘song.’ ‘Song’ in Latin, it has actually become a woman’s name: Carmen. So, in Latin, carmen means song. It also means a magic spell. It means a prophecy, and it means an enchantment. So, ‘carmen’ becomes–comes all the way into English, and it’s the root of our word ‘enchantment’. How do you enchant people? You chant a spell.
So, we have in our culture–and you find this literally in the language and in the history of every culture–a connection between song and magic and poetry because ‘carmen’ is also the word that Romans use for poetry.
And so, what opera does is to go back to the very roots of what song is, which is related to enchantment, to sacred activities that are done by combining the power of poetry with the power of song.
And, it’s interesting how that has been lost with people.
And, see, part of it is that they say, ‘Well,’–it’s funny. They say, ‘Well, the words don’t matter.’ Now, why do they say the words don’t matter? It’s generally because they don’t know the words. They don’t know the language. They haven’t taken the trouble of reading the words. And, the words are actually, I mean, they may not be equal to Goethe or Dante or Shakespeare; but the words of operas are generally pretty well-written. I mean, they’re sort of like the words to musicals: You don’t require the lyrics of a musical song, or a love song especially, to be at the level of Shakespeare’s sonnets. It’s just enough to incite the imagination of the composer so that the combination of the words and music are magical.
Russ Roberts: So, I’m going to think on the webpage for this conversation at econtalk.org and I will put four or five of my favorite arias from YouTube so that listeners who don’t know opera can check them out. These will be things like “Nessun Dorma,” “Au Fond du Temple Saint” from The Pearl Fishers, something from Madame Butterfly, a couple from La Bohème. And, listeners can just try this, a three- to five-minute moment we would hope of enchantment. I’ll encourage you to do the same, Dana. We’ll list those.
But, I want to talk about–we spoke about collaboration. You talk about how the words inspire the composer. And, in a minute, I want us to talk about musicals–because they’re quite similar, if not the same. And, Broadway is very similar to opera–in my view. And I want to hear your thoughts on that, and you talk about it in some of the book. But I wonder, before we get there: I want to talk about the non-collaborative writers of opera and of musicals.
So, I did not realize this: Wagner wrote his own words. He might be the only truly long-time ongoing successful composer who was able to do that. In American popular song, there’s really two. There’s Cole Porter and Irving Berlin–both extraordinary talents, but everyone else is a collaborator. George and Ira Gershwin, Rodgers and Hart/ Rodgers and Hammerstein, Adler and Ross: many, many, many others are teams.
Dana Gioia: But, eventually Sondheim–
Russ Roberts: Well, so then I was going to get to: on Broadway–those are the popular song, meaning the classical American songbook. On Broadway, as far as I know, I only can think of three. You have Sondheim who writes his words and music–and I would argue he often was better as a collaborator than as a–it’s a very controversial view–than as a solo act. I say that because, other than, “Send in the Clowns,” as you point out, he does not have great memorable melodies. Interesting. Meredith Wilson wrote The Music Man, somehow. I don’t think he ever did it again, but it’s a fabulous musical.
Dana Gioia: It is. It’s one of the greatest musicals ever written. And, his subsequent ones were not very good, but–
Russ Roberts: He did it on his own.
Dana Gioia: every number is great.
Russ Roberts: It’s phenomenal. And then, you have Lionel Bart who wrote Oliver!, which is also an extraordinary score. But, those are really the exceptions that prove the rule that this is a collaborative effort, for two reasons probably. Most people aren’t talented enough to be phenomenal at two things at that level. But also, there’s something else going on there that I’d like you to talk about, which is the power of having a teammate. That, when you’re not in the mood, they push you, or when you’re slogging, they push you, or when you’re stuck, they unstick you in a way you somehow struggle to do on your own.
Dana Gioia: Well, at this point, I think I’ve worked with about 30, 35 composers. Some of them just take poems of mine and set them to music. But, in many cases, I write the words for them. And, I’ve seen some song composers–they write and they love the melody, they love the emotion they’re doing, they have a good opening line, and then they just plug the rest of it in. And, they need a collaborator just to say, ‘This is crap. This is a good opening line. We can work with the line, but it’s got to go somewhere.’ And, I think what happens if you’re doing both the words and the music, you’ll either fall in love with the words too much or the music too much, and you need an advocate. You need a devil’s advocate for each side.
And so, you’ll see this. You’ll see a lot of people that write words and music for individual songs, like Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Amy Mann–
Russ Roberts: Yeah, songwriters, we call them.
Dana Gioia: pop things. But, what they’re doing is a little three-minute, four-minute, and this is not the minimum, because those are all Mann and Mitchell, at least when she was younger, and Dylan are people I immensely admire. But, the real thing is: can you write different characters, can you do transitions, can you create scenes? And, that’s where you see the sheer genius of a Verdi who can summon up all these tremendously complicated human emotions immediately just in a few gestures.
So, I do think that–have you ever noticed, I think there’s some people that when you’re around, you’re funnier?
Russ Roberts: Yeah, sure. You’re a better conversationalist.
Dana Gioia: They bring out the comic in you, or they bring out this sincerity in you. And that’s a basic human energy. And, I think an artist needs to have a good sense of: what are the collaborators that make them better versus just what are the collaborators that’ll help them pay the bills?
Russ Roberts: Yeah, I forgot to mention Stephen Schwartz, stupidly. I just saw the film version of Wicked, and it’s really–I’m a huge fan of Wicked, and he is a genius to write the words and music to that show. He is a great composer, but he did, I think, write the line, ‘Life is fraughtless when you’re thoughtless,’ and that’s a pretty good rhyme in “Dancing Through Life.” I’m going to tell–
Dana Gioia: Poetry has given up the wonderful pleasures of rhyme. Rhyme is something that people delight in. So, I don’t see why any poet would want–it doesn’t mean you have to write in rhyme all the time, but you’re silly as a poet if you don’t want to enjoy rhyme.
Russ Roberts: So, I’m going to tell a crazy story I’ve never told on the air before. I never told it publicly, hardly to anyone. But, I was an assistant professor at the University of Rochester, and Rochester has a very fine music school, and one of the top music schools in the country, the Eastman School. And, they slummed and offered a course in how to write a musical. And, this was very controversial at Eastman because Eastman was a classical place. And, they brought Charles Strouse, who had just fairly recently written Annie, to come teach a class on taking a musical.
And, I love musicals even more than opera, and so I audited this class secretly because I didn’t want my chairman, Walter Oi, to know I was taking it because it was not going to contribute to my refereed publications. So, the first class, they brought in a photographer because they were going to do an article for the magazine [inaudible 00:32:30], and I literally spent the time hunkering down between the–putting my head down under the desks because I didn’t want to be in that photograph.
But, anyway: so we’re sitting there and everybody’s in awe of this man because he’s such a giant talent, and these are the most musical-loving students at Eastman. So, he says, ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘You’re all writing musicals, right?’ And, I’m thinking, ‘Well, not exactly,’ but I’d written a song or two in my time. And, they all nodded. And, he said, ‘I’d like someone to stand up and come perform one of their songs,’ and a terrible silence, of course, descended on the room. No one wanted to be the person to go first.
So, finally, some guy stood up and said, ‘I’ll go.’ And, he said, ‘Tell me about the musical.’ And, he said, ‘Well, it’s a musical of Ayn Rand’s novella, Anthem.’ And I thought, ‘Well, this is not going to go well. It’s going to be a disaster. It’s not really much of a musical idea. It’s not going to work.’ And, I’m feeling bad for this kid, and I’m 26 or 27 or 28, and this kid’s 20 or 19, whatever he is. And so, Strouse says, ‘Go ahead.’
So, the kid sits down, and he’s at the piano, and he pounds out the most exhilarating rock-opera-style song about freedom from oppression. And, by the way, if anyone listening knows who this person is–I’ve lost track of him. He later won the award as a senior for the best symphony at Eastman, and I never heard from him again. And, he was a brilliant, brilliant person. But, anyway, he’s sitting; he’s playing this song, and all of us in the crowd are in–our jaws are dropped because the brilliance of the song is so extraordinary. And we’re so happy for him because he hasn’t made a fool of himself.
But, I’m also looking at Strouse, and I’m thinking, ‘Well, if the first song is this good, what’s he going to possibly?’–I mean, he can’t just say, ‘That was wonderful. Who is next?’
So, he finishes and we go nuts. We applaud him tremendously because of his courage and the quality of it. And, Strouse sits there for a few seconds, and he said, ‘You know in that section where you were playing the instrumental and not singing?’ He says, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘What’s going to be happening on stage when that’s going on?’ And, the kid went, ‘Oh. Yeah.’ And that was the tiny glimpse I saw of that collaborative process of one person holding the other accountable.
There’s more humor from that experience, which I’ll leave for another time; but that idea that you learn from another and grow together to produce something extraordinary must be an amazing thing for the two of them. It’s a marriage that is founded on music rather than romantic love. And, wow, that must be exhilarating.
Dana Gioia: Well, one of the most interesting relationships in opera is between Mozart and Da Ponte [Lorenzo Da Ponte]. And, Mozart is writing Italian operas. He even wrote an opera in Latin for church things. But, what Mozart really likes is kind of stupid jokes and bumptious humor. He’s the most sophisticated musician who has ever lived, but there’s a lot of truth in the depiction that they have in Amadeus. I mean, they exaggerate it, but Mozart and his father and sister are always making poop jokes in their letters.
And, suddenly he gets this fantastically sophisticated Venetian Jew who has become a priest, but then has run off with women–is one of the best friends of Giacomo Casanova. And, this fellow is extraordinarily sophisticated, and he writes these librettos that are–it’s like a person doing action films who suddenly you realize is a great dramatic actor. And, Mozart writes the three greatest operas of his career one after the other: Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Cosi fan tutte.
And then, he writes a wonderful kind of goofy opera called The Magic Flute, which is basically written by a comedian that runs a theater as a star vehicle for himself–so, he can play the glockenspiel and he can do these various–the shtick that he does. And, Mozart writes La Clemenza di Tito, which is great music and just a total dud. I mean, it’s soporific in performance, even though it’s clearly by Mozart.
But, there was something about that collaboration with Da Ponte that made the most sophisticated kind of musical comedy that’s ever existed in opera. [More to come, 37:59]
And, there’s another fellow named Arrigo Boito who was a young composer and he’s also a poet, and he loves Verdi. And, Verdi has decided he’s going to retire. And so, Boito goes and hangs around Verdi; and he has these little tricks to make Verdi actually want to write an opera about–how, ‘Well, I’ve written this great libretto based on Shakespeare’s Othello, and I’m going to give it to this composer.’ And Verdi says, ‘No, no, that composer is no good.’ And he’ll come back the next week: ‘I’m going to give it to this composer.’
And, he gets Verdi so upset that’s Verdi is thinking about it all the time. So Verdi writes this.
He comes out of retirement; and then, you know, Boito goes, ‘Well, Verdi, you had a great career, but you had a couple of flops. Simon Boccanegra is a terrible flop.’ And Verdi says, ‘Well,’ so they end up rewriting it–I mean, from top to bottom, adding new scenes, dropping scenes. And then, finally, Verdi’s now hitting 80. And, Boito says, ‘Well, you had a great career, but you only wrote one comedy at the beginning of your career, and it was a flop. It’s a shame that you were not a great comic opera.’ And, suddenly, Verdi writes Falstaff because he wants to prove that he’s got a comic genius, and he writes another great opera.
So, Boito not only had the power to write great libretti, and he’s one of the people that took other composers who never had an opera that lasted; but the one opera that Boito wrote for him–like, Ponchielli wrote La Gioconda–and Boito had a psychological ability to take this temperamental genius, which was Giuseppe Verdi, the greatest Italian composer perhaps ever, and lure him out of retirement by, I think, by frank psychological manipulation. And, I got to believe that Verdi’s ghost was, in retrospect, glad to be manipulated.
Russ Roberts: Oh, yeah. Just to make it clear, I said seven. You write in the book, quote, “The majority of the operas still regularly performed have libretti by only five poets: Romani, Piave, Boito, Illica, and Cammarano. Their verse had a”–
Dana Gioia: That’s in the Italian repertory, I’m saying. In the world repertory it’s seven, seven creators.
Russ Roberts: Okay, so I wasn’t totally wrong.
Dana Gioia: I said, if you just go to opera in Italian, which is where opera is invented and opera is still practiced, it’s even more extraordinary. It’s just these five poets; and this is out of thousands of poets who wrote.
So, it’s not surprising that art is related to talent and that collaborative art–see, people don’t quite understand collaborative art because we have a notion that art is about lonely geniuses suffering in their solitude. But, I don’t think Ira and George Gershwin suffered in their solitude. I think they sat at the piano and they were joking and arguing and it was–they played off each other’s energy.
And so, a lot of the arts people like best–movies, dance, musicals, opera, even a lot of songwriting–comes out of teams. And, we don’t have the language in traditional criticism to talk about this kind of mysterious human energy that’s synergistic in terms of creative collaboration.
Russ Roberts: I think I’m right about this: We’ve talked about how when composers lost their librettist, they struggled to write a successful opera, let alone a great one. But, it’s also true in the other direction. Ira Gershwin’s brother George dies, I think at 36–an incredible tragedy of lost art we’ll never have. He writes, I don’t know, 25 of the greatest, if not more, greatest songs ever written in the American songbook and some wonderful other music. But, Ira, although he does write–he’s a songwriter for the rest of his life–he struggles to create songs, to find a composer who can inspire him the way his brother did. And, he writes some hits–I’m blanking on them now, there’s some, but his–
Dana Gioia: Vernon Duke, he works well with Vernon Duke. Yeah, but it’s funny. If you took the Ira Gershwin’s songs and said, ‘What are the best ones?’ you’d probably be down to 10 or 11 before the non-George songs come in. Because “Log Cabin in the Sky” was a big hit, but it was–
Russ Roberts: It’s not immortal.
Dana Gioia: but we don’t really listen to those songs much anymore.
The most interesting case of that is Richard Rodgers.
Russ Roberts: I was thinking the same thing.
Dana Gioia: It was with Rodgers and Hart. He creates a kind of song and he creates a kind of musical with Hart. And then, Hart, who is a terrible drunk and a closeted homosexual and a chain smoker–
Russ Roberts: Depressive–
Dana Gioia: and he’s always frail, so he drops dead. And, Rodgers doesn’t know what to do, but he’s known Oscar Hammerstein who has worked with other composers, too. And the two of them create, I think, some of the three or four of the greatest musicals ever written. And, even the ones that aren’t hits are all–but I mean South Pacific—
Russ Roberts: Oklahoma—
Dana Gioia: is to me one of the–Oklahoma–these are–even The Sound of Music, which is I think one of my wife’s favorites, these are incredible things. But they’re very different than from the songs that he wrote with Rodgers and Hart. And, Hammerstein is just a different sort of sensibility. And, Rodgers says, ‘I can’t write without the words, and I get good words–,’ and so he’s always begging for new lyrics and things like this. But, it’s–not only did he sustain his career, but he invented a different Richard Rodgers sound.
Russ Roberts: I’m a bit of a snob on this. I love the songs of Rodgers and Hart, “Bewitched and Bewildered,” “My Funny Valentine.” Both the music and the lyrics I think are at the top. I don’t particularly like Rodgers and Hammerstein. I think Hammerstein brought out a side of Rodgers musically that–it’s okay, I understand it’s popular. I don’t love Oklahoma. I don’t love Sound of Music. I don’t love South Pacific. They’re very nice songs. But Rodgers and Hart’s songs are extraordinary. And so, that’s life; and it’s a fascinating example.
Dana Gioia: Well, let me offer a collaborative dissent to your argument.
Russ Roberts: Okay, please.
Dana Gioia: I think that Rodgers and Hart wrote greater songs than musicals. I think Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote greater musicals than excerptable songs. I mean–
Russ Roberts: One hundred percent. That’s a great observation.
Dana Gioia: So, if you watch South Pacific–and so, I mean, the theatrical effect of, “I’m Going to Wash that Man Right Out of My Hair” is much greater than it has as an excerptable song. And so, I think that what Hammerstein did–and it comes out of Hammerstein’s background–is created popular musical theater at its height.
And, indeed, there’s a lot of musicals that you love, that don’t have excerptable songs.
And, this is the point I was making about Stephen Sondheim. And I think–because, one of the things that fascinates me in this book, the book is called Weep, Shudder, Die–it has a scene from La Bohème on the cover–and I’m talking about Italian opera and German opera. But, I begin to talk about American opera, because I’m an American poet. I work with American composers, maybe a few British composers. And I’m really fascinated by: how have we created opera in the United States? Because, we’ve been importing opera from Italy. In the 19th century, opera was as popular as movies were in the 20th century.
And I look at the career of Leonard Bernstein. I talk about the Broadway musical–which is interesting because you take this European operetta, which you have in New York, and you add a kind of combination of Jewish and African-American flavor in it, and you create the Broadway musical.
And I end up–and this surprised me–I think, in terms of saying that what’s the greatest recent opera is Sweeney Todd by Sondheim.
Sondheim has a very weird career. I mean, the thing that surprised me–I love lists. You’re an economist. You’ll appreciate this. I love numbers. I like data points, to see what the data points tell me, because a lot of times the data will tell me things that I don’t already know or will tell me that some of the things that I think I know are wrong.
But, the thing that amazed is if you take the 100 most popular Broadway musicals, Sondheim didn’t write any of them. I think it’s 120s or something before he appears, with–and what does he appear with? A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, which is his–
Russ Roberts: From his youth–
Dana Gioia: first musical. It’s a conventional musical, which once again has one hit song, “Comedy Tonight.” Which is a great theatrical song. It doesn’t really survive as a pop song. Because–it’s like “No Business Like Show Business.”
And so, he writes these–he works with other composers; and you got to say, he does it: he writes the lyrics to West Side Story and Gypsy. I mean, you can’t get better lyrics than he wrote Styne [Jule Styne] and Bernstein [Leonard Bernstein].
And then he starts writing his own musicals. And, the real Sondheim people just think all these early musicals are great. I don’t think so. I think he’s a great lyricist, but he’s got a very strange sensibility–very unhappy, skeptical, critical, this capability. People don’t go to Broadway to have people talk about why they can’t have relationships and they’ll never be happy. And that’s mother’s milk to Stephen Sondheim. [More to come, 48:48]