When talking about the author of the opera, the composer is usually called. But any opera also has an author who wrote its literary text. Sometimes it happens that the composer writes the text himself, as A. Borodin did for his opera "Prince Igor", but more often composers entrust such work to poets.
Opera is sometimes called an elite art form, i.e. accessible only to a narrow circle of the elite. This is, of course, an exaggeration, but many people really find this genre too difficult to understand. Such listeners, in particular, complain that they cannot make out the words that are sung in the opera.
To a certain extent, this is the culprit of modern opera singers, who have completely ceased to pay attention to diction, in contrast to the singers of the "old school". However, if a person is not used to perceiving the classical manner of singing, he may have problems with good diction of the singers. The matter is complicated by the fact that at present in Russia a tradition that came from the West is being established - operas by foreign composers are performed not in Russian translation, but in the original language. Understanding the opera can be helped by a preliminary acquaintance with the libretto.
What is an opera libretto
The word "libretto" is translated from Italian as "little book". This is what the literary text of the opera is called. Sometimes composers use independent literary works as librettos. So did, for example, S. Dargomyzhsky, having written an opera on the full text of the tragedy of A. Pushkin "The Stone Guest". A. A. Rimsky-Korsakov did the same with another tragedy of A. S. Pushkin - "Mozart and Salieri". In such cases, it remains only to find the literary source of the opera and read it.
Still, such cases are quite rare in composing practice. Usually, the literary source of an opera is reworked when writing a libretto. Sometimes even the plot turns into its opposite, as happened with the story of A. S. Pushkin "The Queen of Spades" when creating the opera of the same name by P. I. Tchaikovsky. In this case, it is useless to get acquainted with the content of the opera from the literary source.
How to get to know the opera libretto
There are collection books called "Opera Librettos". The title of such books does not fully correspond to the content, since they do not print librettos of operas in them, i.e. not their full texts, but a summary of the plots. If a person wants to get a general idea of the content of the opera, such a book will suffice.
If you need just the libretto, the full text, it is convenient to read it in the opera clavier. This is the name of the transcription of the opera for piano, preserving the parts of the singers and chorus. The piano scores of the most famous operas are usually found in large libraries, in departments devoted to literature on art. There you can also find opera librettos, published in the form of separate brochures. With such a brochure, it is convenient to track the text while listening to the opera.
It is even more convenient and easier to find opera librettos on the Internet. There are many sites where they are collected. An example is the site "Libretto of Operas" (libretto-oper.ru). Here are not only popular operas, such as "Rigoletto" or "Sadko", but also little-known ones, for example, "Matteo Falcone" by C. Cui. Operas are classified not only by composer, but also alphabetically by title.
There are also websites where you can find opera librettos in the original language, for example, www.operafolio.com.
