ABSTRACT
Discussions concerning the relative merits of music and language have tended to revolve around the issue of signification, and therefore of lack: music lacks an ability to say what it means, via a sign system, whereas language does not; language lacks music’s ability to signify without the trammels of signification to which language itself is subject. The respective shortcomings have been valued differently at different historical moments and can be traced not only through the history of literature, but also of music, texted music in particular. Within these histories, one genre – the libretto – stands out, quietly enough, as a paradigm of music’s evaluation of the literature which comes into its orbit, and so of the aforementioned tendency of the two arts to resort to charges of deficiency. Imagine a literary text with negligible value in its own right; or rather, a text the value of which is judged in inverse proportion to its own verbal distinction; a text which many have comfortably ignored, and will ignore, in their experience of it, or at least pass over with only the minimum pause for thought; a text perceived in the main as a means to an end largely beyond its own resources. There are exceptions to these conditions, but they only serve to prove the rule of a narrative fiction defined by what it lacks. In the words of W.H. Auden, a notable librettist, the libretto is ‘a private letter to the composer’, the words of which are ‘as expendable as infantry to a Chinese general’ (611).1 Auden’s time-bound analogy seems now to perform the very charge it makes.
