Libretto - Literary Characteristics

Literary Characteristics

The opera libretto from its inception (ca. 1600) was written in verse, and this continued well into the 19th century, although genres of musical theater with spoken dialogue have typically alternated verse in the musical numbers with spoken prose. Since the late 19th century some opera composers have written music to prose or free verse libretti. Much of the recitative of George Gershwin's opera Porgy and Bess, for instance, is merely DuBose and Dorothy Heyward's play Porgy set to music as written - in prose - with the lyrics of the arias, duets, trios and choruses written in verse.

The libretto of a musical, on the other hand, is almost always written in prose (except for the song lyrics). The libretto of a musical, if the musical is adapted from a play (or even a novel), may even borrow their source's original dialogue liberally - much as Oklahoma! used dialogue from Lynn Riggs's Green Grow the Lilacs, Carousel used dialogue from Ferenc Molnár's Liliom, My Fair Lady took most of its dialogue word-for-word from George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, Man of La Mancha took most of its dialogue from the 1959 television play I, Don Quixote (from which it was adapted), and the 1954 musical version of Peter Pan used J.M. Barrie's dialogue. Even the musical Show Boat, which is greatly different from the Edna Ferber novel from which it was adapted uses some of Ferber's original dialogue, notably during the miscegenation scene. And Lionel Bart's Oliver! uses chunks of dialogue from Charles Dickens's novel Oliver Twist, although it bills itself as a "free adaptation" of the novel.