Weep, Shudder, Die: On Opera and Poetry by Dana Gioia. Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2024. Paperback. 220 pp. $19.95
The first time I ever saw an opera, I wept. The opera was Puccini’s La bohème. Sprawled on my parents’ futon bed in upstate New York, I was transfixed, glued to our staticky television set as the lead soprano sang her signature aria. Spelled across the screen were the English translations to Illica’s Italian libretto: Mi chiamano Mimi, il perchè non so [They call me Mimi. Why? I do not know]. Charmed by the simplicity of the text and the playful shrug of Mimi’s lace-clad shoulders, my eyes read along eagerly, hungrily. I watched in disgust as the coquettish Musetta played mercilessly with Marcello’s heart. I shuddered as Mimi grew progressively more ill, dying of consumption, with her lover Rodolfo unable to help her. My parents, who had never once permitted my brothers or me to be late to a meal, quietly slipped me a bowl of soup. They knew well the forces they were up against. And, as the curtains fell upon Mimi’s deathbed, with tears streaming down my face, I knew I had fallen in love. I was six years old.
It would be ten years before I would see a live opera. Yet the spell cast over me during that initial television broadcast has never been broken, and the most vivid part of the memory—even more than the sweeping grandeur of the music or the brightly-colored costumes—remains, strangely enough, the subtitles. My first experience of opera was text-driven.
In his introduction to Weep, Shudder, Die: On Opera and Poetry, Gioia asserts that “the libretto is not a shabby coat rack on which the magnificent vestments of music are hung. Operas begin with the words” (xii). Throughout the book’s wonderfully varied chapters, Gioia’s overarching thesis remains clear: The canon of enduring, long-lasting operatic repertoire—those operas to which we return, time and time again—owe their success and longevity to the compelling nature of their libretti. In Gioia’s own words, “Strong words inspire composers, weak words burden them” (xii). Weep, Shudder, Die is, above all, a tribute to the unsung heroes of opera: the librettists.
Gioia is uniquely suited to writing such a book. Despite having served as Poet Laureate of California, Chairman for the National Endowment for the Arts, and—at one time—even as corporate vice president for General Foods, Gioia is not merely an opera lover. He bears the distinction of having written libretti for five different operas: Nosferatu (2004), with music by Alva Henderson; Tony Caruso’s Final Broadcast (2010) and Haunted (2009), with Paul Salerni; and The Three Feathers (2014) and Maya and the Magic Ring (2025) with Lori Laitman (221).
In the first five chapters of the book, Gioia gives his readers statistical evidence for the importance of the opera librettist. Pointing out that some of the greatest composers in the world—Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms, and Mahler—failed to ever write a “successful opera,” Gioia suggests that musical genius is not enough (9). The most popular operas in the world come not only from a small handful of composers, but also from a select group of librettists: “Half of the international standard repertory…are the work of only eight poets” (12). Thus, Gioia argues, powerful operatic music does not exist in a vacuum; it is inspired, called forth by powerful words.
Modern listeners often assume that the words are secondary to opera because performances are frequently sung in their original, foreign language. However, as Gioia points out in his historical overview of the genre, the earliest operas were sung for local audiences, “in the vernacular,” as it were. Renaissance opera, which found its origins in sixteenth-century Italy, was meant to “recreate” the experience of attending a classical Greek drama. Early opera sounded more like “intoned declamation” than singing (4); it was only in subsequent centuries that opera came to be characterized by vocal virtuosity and florid musical excess. By a fascinating turn of events, today’s operagoers increasingly place renewed emphasis on the meaning of the text. With the advent of “surtitles” in 1983, providing a “simultaneous translation” for attendees has become the new standard, often in multiple languages (8). In a Verdi opera I saw in Budapest last summer, personalized screens furnished surtitles in English, German, Hungarian, and the original Italian. Gioia’s book has come at an important time: “Technology [has] made twenty-first century opera almost as literary as its Renaissance prototype” (8).
After giving an historical overview of opera’s origins and sharing statistical evidence for the impact that a good libretto can have on an opera’s success, Gioia also proceeds to narrate an account of his own first encounters with opera. Readers can delight in the story of a working-class Los Angeles boy who fell in love with the “bewildering pleasure” of the opera records he listened to in his parents’ apartment after school. Further proving his point that text is central to an experience of opera, young Gioia seems to have had a particular fascination with American operas because—in an era before surtitles—he could understand the words and follow along with the drama.
One of the greatest strengths of Gioia’s book is the important distinction he makes between poetic verse and poetic drama. A librettist may be an accomplished poet, but a successful opera requires a libretto with powerful simplicity, compelling characters, and a dramatic plot. In his chapter, “Auden Abandons Poetry,” Gioia draws his readers’ attention to operas that “read well on the page as verse drama” but fail to inspire a clear musical narrative (53). He traces Auden’s evolution as a librettist, explaining that the poet’s eventual operatic successes came after he realized that the “lyrics [are] secondary to characterization and plotting” (52). A good opera is propelled by strong text, but
A libretto does not succeed on how well it reads on the printed page. The words can only be judged in their final context, set to music…. Poetic drama—comic or tragic—is not primarily poetic; it is theater that uses poetry to intensify the language that the drama requires (57).
Here, Gioia’s excellent summary captures another recurring theme in his book: that successful opera is the result of dynamic collaboration. A librettist cannot write the verses with just his own ideal poetic ends in mind; likewise, a composer cannot draft the music in such a way that obscures or diminishes the power of the text. Citing some of the greatest operatic partnerships—Hugo von Hoffmansthal and Richard Strauss, Felice Romani and Vincenzo Bellini, Lorenzo da Ponte and W.A. Mozart—Gioia provides a compelling argument against the “Romantic notion of the artist as an individual creative force” (15). Literary critics of the twentieth century complained that, after “Goethe and Schiller,” the Aristotelian, cathartic form of tragic theater had disappeared almost entirely (68). Gioia disagrees with this complaint altogether, arguing that tragedy did not disappear in the Romantic age—it simply switched genres:
The great tragedies of the Romantic age did not appear on the theatrical stage but in the opera house. The masterpieces were not written by Shelley, Byron, Hugo, or Hölderlin; they were composed by Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi, and Wagner (69).
An implication of this argument, which Gioia hints at without stating explicitly, is that truly great opera is the result of collaboration rather than individual creative genius. One exception to this theory, as Gioia himself readily admits, would be composer Richard Wagner, who wrote all of his own libretti. Wagner’s preeminent Gesamtkunstwerk, his Ring cycle, which consists of four consecutive operas and over fifteen hours of music, certainly does not seem to have been written with a collaborative deadline in mind.
In any case, Gioia’s discussion of artistic partnership—and the humility, collaboration, and tension often needed to create an operatic masterpiece—is not merely an interesting highlight of his book, but something also confirmed by his own experiences writing opera libretti. Gioia writes, “Working with other artists is not easy. The pleasure is mixed with anxiety, frustration, and disagreement; but shared labor nurtures deep friendship” (198). In the contemporary world of opera, a librettist is often viewed as a workhorse who exists only to “do the impresario and composer’s bidding” (201). Gioia, by contrast, has more than once made the extraordinary request that he be permitted to choose the subject matter for his opera libretti. With a foot in both the literary and the musical world, Gioia appears to be an ideal librettist for modern opera. Because of his deep belief in the importance of the text, he chooses his own subject so that the story contains a “genuine poetic spark” (201); simultaneously, he defers to musical forms and the composer’s input while crafting individual scenes and arias.
One aspect of the book that is not quite as clearly woven into the overall thematic structure is Gioia’s commentary on American opera. As much as these sections are informative and clearly well-researched, I found myself wondering why Gioia chooses to include such a lengthy overview of American opera’s development in the latter half of his book. This topic, however, proves relevant in setting up some of the final, lingering questions at the book’s conclusion. A book about an archaic musical form like opera must necessarily comment upon the future of the genre. American opera is remarkably difficult to categorize. Is Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess an opera? How about Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, or Bernstein’s Candide? The fact that the lines between opera and musical theatre are so blurred in the American repertory, Gioia argues, is no accident. Successful opera relies on the momentum, the forward thrust, of a dramatic text—and popular musical theatre is rooted in such texts. Stephen Sondheim, we are told, received his training as a lyricist from none other than Oscar Hammerstein: “I was essentially trained by Oscar Hammerstein,” Sondheim recalled, “to think of songs as one-act plays, to move a song from point A to point B dramatically” (165). American opera has been most successful when it borrows from and is enriched by popular musical traditions—Broadway musicals, African American music, jazz rhythms and harmonies (182). Gioia applauds such musical “fusion,” as he calls it; while some may “denounce such borrowing as cultural appropriation; most see it as the creative conversation between cultures and classes” (182).
Such comments suggest that Gioia resists the “professional snobbery” that can often characterize classical musicians, composers, and operagoers. “It is naive to believe,” writes Gioia, “[that] American opera will become more vital by clinging to elite inbreeding” (184). He offers a different approach, situating the future of opera—both in America and in our increasingly globalized world—in its willingness to expand, to become an “omnivorous” genre (182). Instead of remaining encased in a glass box, opera must shatter our expectations; it must explore the “extremes of human experience” and portray the “outmost limits of suffering” (68). Like the singers, we too must allow ourselves to weep, shudder, and die.
Zsanna Mária Bodor is a Ph.D. student in English Literature at Baylor University. A singer and violinist, she has a special interest in examining the intersection of music, poetry, and spiritual encounter.
