WORD COUNT
Squillo
By Michael White
Librettists don’t have too much need for a collective noun, because they rarely meet together in collective enterprise; but if they wanted one, a ‘Grievance of Librettists’ wouldn’t be a bad fit. It certainly reflects what happened recently when one of those rare meetings did take place.
The venue was the Guildhall School at London’s Barbican, which runs postgraduate programmes in what it calls ‘Opera Making and Writing’: a graceless piece of Anglo-Saxon usage that, while attempting to be comprehensive, manages to make something inherently exciting sound pedestrian.
Within this catch-all designation comes the work of the librettist. So it was that the Guildhall ran a study afternoon on ‘The Role of the Writer in Opera’: an afternoon generously thrown open to all and sundry, including me (as I’ve written the odd libretto), and even more generously including tea and biscuits at half-time.