Product Description

Complete in Italian and English, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Ideal for following a recorded performance, or for familiarizing oneself with a libretto before a live performance, this volume contains the complete libretti of three of Mozart’s most popular operas. Excellent line-for-line English translations face the Italian texts. Also included are introductions, plot synopses and lists of characters for each opera. Translated by Robert Pack and Marjorie Lelash.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #462182 in Books
• Published on: 1993-09-28
• Original language: Italian
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Language Notes
Text: English, Italian (translation)
Original Language: Italian

Customer Reviews

Inaccurate presentation, unexplained omissions, mistakes in the translation
This is an awful edition of these libretti.

First of all, the editors have given us, not the libretti themselves, but a record of what is sung in the opera. That is, if a character repeats a word, the editors have correspondingly repeated that word in the text, as many times as the character repeats it, even if in the libretto as it was written, each word appeared only once. This unnecessarily bloats the text, since words tend to be repeated in this opera with a surprising frequency. For example, on p. 64, during the Act II Finale, the editors print an exchange between Figaro and the others as follows:

FIGARO: Nol conosco.
SUSANNA: Nol conosci?
FIGARO: No!
LA CONTESSA: Nol conosci?
FIGARO: No!
IL CONTE: Nol conosci?
FIGARO: No!
SUSANNA, LA CONTESSA, IL CONTE: Nol conosci?
FIGARO: No! No! No!

This is not only unnecessary, it is not even an accurate record of how the passage is sung: The first line of Figaro's should be "Nol conosco, nol conosco." Furthermore, it obscures the structure of the text, hiding the rhymes and making many lines scan improperly.

Of course, even without the repetitions, you would have difficulty scanning the lines anyway, because the editors have inserted the line-breaks incorrectly. For example, on p. 12 the Duet between Figaro and Susanna is printed as follows:

FIGARO: Se a caso madama la notte ti chiama --
Din, din, din, din --
In due passi da quella puoi gir.
Vien poi l'occasione
Che vuolmi il padrone--
Don, don, don, don --
In tre salti lo vado a servir.

The correct lineation is:

Se a caso Madama
La notte ti chiama:
Din din: in due passi
Da quella puoi gir.
Vien poi l'occasione
Che vuolmi il padrone,
Don don in tre salti
Lo vado a servir.

This is not a merely technical objection. The faulty lineation and unnecessarily repeated words obscure the structure of the text, hide the rhymes, and undercut the ingenious way in which words and rhythm are united in the music. And they are rife throughout the book.

In the Foreword, the editors, perhaps in an effort to justify these peculiarities, write that "our texts approximate as closely as possible what our readers will actually see and hear, since this book is intended not as a scholarly work but as an attempt to make the riches of Mozart's operas more accessible to a less specialized audience." I agree with these goals, but I think that introducing faults into the work was not the way to achieve them. In fact, it had quite the opposite effect. The "scholar" and "expert" will be able to correct the lines and restore their original harmony: it is the "less specialized" man who loses out in the end by having "the riches" of the work obscured.

Last but not least, as a previous reviewer noted, the editors have introduced arbitrary cuts into the work. Not only No 28 of Cosi Fan Tutte (Despina's aria "E amore un ladroncello"), but also the preceding number is cut (Ferrando's recitative and aria "In qual fiero contrasto... Tradito, schernito"). There appears to be no reason or system behind these cuts. In Marriage of Figaro, Marcellina's aria "Il capro e la capretta" is included with the footnote "usually omitted in performance", but Basilio's following aria, "In quegli anni, in cui val poco", which is omitted from performances with equal frequency, is cut from the text without even a note. These are only some of the more glaring excisions, which are widespread, and sometimes even lead to mistranslations.

For example, on p. 106, in a bit of Figaro's recitative, the Italian text reads "In questo stesso loco celebrerem la festa della mia sposa onesta e del feudal signor" meaning "In this very place we will celebrate the wedding of my honest wife and the feudal lord", but this phrase has no translation on the English side. Instead, the English side reads: "Hide yourselves, and don't come out until I whistle", presumably a paraphrase of what would have been the following line: "Voi da questi contorni non vi scotate; ... a un fischio mio correte tutti quanti", which, however, was cut from the Italian text without any mention. In other words, the editors printed one part of the Italian text, but translated the other part. This has one slight benefit: it allows us to reconstruct the portions of the text that have been left out.

Here is one further example of the awkwardness of this edition. It is the very first page of the very first opera in the book, The Marriage of Figaro:

FIGARO: Cinque -- dieci -- venti --
Trenta -- trenta sei -- quarantatre.
SUSANNA: Ora si, ch'io son contenta,
Sembra fatto in ver per me.
FIGARO: Cinque.
SUSANNA: Guarda un po', mio caro Figaro!
FIGARO: Dieci. Venti.
SUSANNA: Guarda adesso il mio cappello!
FIGARO: Quarantatre.
SUSANNA: Guarda un po' mio caro Figaro.
Guarda adesso il mio cappello!
FIGARO: Si, mio core, or e piu bello.
Sembra fatto in ver per te.

First of all, the first two lines are incorrectly printed: "Trenta" belongs at the end of the previous line, giving it its full count of eight syllables, and rhyming pleasantly with "contenta". Secondly, all the material betwen "Sembra fatto in ver per me and Susanna's last "Guarda un po'" is unnecessarily repeated text. We do not need it. The passage should read:

FIGARO: Cinque -- dieci -- venti -- trenta --
Trenta sei -- quarantatre.
SUSANNA: Ora si, ch'io son contenta,
Sembra fatto in ver per me.
Guarda un po' mio caro Figaro.
Guarda adesso il mio cappello!
FIGARO: Si, mio core, or e piu bello.
Sembra fatto in ver per te.

Here the rhymes (cappello -- bello, trenta -- contenta, me -- te) pop out, the rhythm of the lines is preserved, and the structure of the text is much easier to grasp.

These may seem minor problems, but they add up throughout the text, and with the amount of crossing out and rearranging that you will have to do in order to understand the real structure of the text, you might as well write down the words yourself.

These Dover libretti do not even have the advantage of matching the Dover score, despite the Bibliographical Note at the front of the book claiming that "The Italian has been tacitly corrected to conform with the Dover full scores of these operas." If you try to use the Dover score together with these libretti, you will notice some discrepancies, and not only in cases where some text that is present in the score has been cut from the libretto. Sometimes a passage, present in both the score and the libretto, has a different wording in each. For example, on p. 106 of the libretto, Bartolo asks "Ma che guadagni?"; at the corresponding place in the score, he asks "Ma cosa nacque?"

Furthermore, the scene numbers, present in the Dover score, have been left out of the libretti. It may well be the case that "the system of beginning another 'scene' every time a new character is introduced seems antiquated and confusing," but it is even more confusing to try to line up the Dover score with the Dover libretto. We are left to turn pages in a vain search for a piece of text, which we will never find anyway because it has been cut out or changed.

I would give this zero stars if it were possible. It deserves the lowest rating. Don't buy it.

"Complete in Italian and English" is misleading
I picked up this book, because I was writing a paper and thought that having the libretto of Cosi Fan Tutte would be helpful. I would not have bought the book had not the word "complete" been on the front cover. However, it is not complete: Aria N. 28, which was the reason for my buying the book, was completely cut out. I found this very irritating.

Other than that, I found this an easy and pleasent read, and facing pages of Italian are always nice

Shame Dover, shame
The Cosi Ran Tutte libretto was what I read first after purchasing this Dover book--I have not checked the others. Here and there chunks of Cosi are missing --it is not "complete" as the title claims.