Note: I am working on a libretto right now, and the best way to learn to write something new is to study examples. I thought it might be interesting for you to watch the process of learning a new art form, and then, when my libretto is done, perhaps someone will do a close reading of it and see if it’s successful!
In this series, I give a brief history of an opera (with a link to a synopsis) and then share some of my observations about the libretto. What I’m looking for is dramatic force: when and how does a libretto provide the dramatic force to sustain an opera and to inspire a composer? What themes are particularly suited to opera? I’m also interested in pacing: how much story can a libretto reasonably hope to tell? I’m not primarily interested in commenting on the music, though of course some musical observations will arise in my close look at the words.
This week is a special edition in the libretto series: rather than spotlighting a libretto for an opera, I’d like to draw your attention to a libretto for a ballet, specifically, a brand-new classical ballet, Raffaella, commissioned by the Stroik family and premiering in South Bend, Indiana, this past June.
The ballet follows a fairytale libretto developed by Duncan and Ruth Stroik in honor of their daughter Raffaella, a ballerina who died in a tragic accident some years ago. The libretto beautifully follows traditional fairytale themes—and when I say that, I mean real fairytales, not Disneyfied fairytales. The story here is beautiful, spiritually resonant, and classically tragic (it ends with a death) while retaining the profoundly Christian sensibility of a Hans Christian Andersen tale. It is also simple enough to be told through only the movements of the dancers.
The action unfolds in a fairytale northern Italy; the set is reminscent of Lake Como and the surrounding regions. When the young Raffaella is born, her birth brings joy to her entire town. From the beginning, her existence spreads a quasi-miraculous joy to others. Early in the ballet, a holy man blesses her, fulfilling the role often given to a fairy or groups of fairies. From this blessing, Raffaella blossoms into a gifted dancer and a beautifully pure soul. She helps her friends and fellow townspeople navigate conflict (including a stunning sword-fight scene) and spends happy days with her family. She also encounters a mysterious Prince dressed all in white, who chastely wooes her and wins her heart.
But eventually, she aspires to more; she leaves her hometown with her family’s blessing and goes to the city to learn to dance. She studies with a magnificent dancer, the Emerald Queen, who pays special attention to her because of her talent. She meets a handsome, dashing young man, the Dark Prince, who tries to win her over. At first he is respectful, but soon he is trying to seduce her with promises of worldly glory and wealth. When Raffaella resists, he threatens her with an army of demons, and suddenly the White Prince of her childhood appears with an army of angels to battle for her soul. Raffaella is saved and returns home to her family, but she has given her heart entirely to the White Prince and she no longer has a place in this world. The ballet ends with her gesturing gracefully towards heaven as her true Prince takes her away to his kingdom.
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A new classical ballet is a rare thing, for a couple of reasons as far as I can tell (I am not particularly well informed about ballet, so please drop in comments if you have other insights).
1) A classical ballet is very expensive to start from scratch. These performances require extensive set design, costumes, and choreography that is expensive to develop. With so many excellent classical ballets in the repertoire, it doesn’t make sense to create very many new classical ballets.
2) It’s a bit of magic to find a classically minded composer, a classically minded choreographer, and a beautiful new libretto all at the same time—that creative team doesn’t come along very often, and combined with the financial constraints, the opportunities to make a new classic ballet are vanishingly rare.
3) Finally, and most perfidiously, the themes of classical ballet do not receive a warm welcome in the contemporary art world. Chaste love; self-sacrifice; respect for family, tradition, and religion; an awareness of the tempting, defiling nature of worldly success; these are the kinds of themes that contemporary art lumps in with “the patriarchy” and either ignores or “subverts”.
With all this in mind, Raffaella is an incredible accomplishment. I don’t say “incredible” lightly. That this ballet came into being in the year 2024, with its simple, pure soul and astonishing production quality, is truly hard to believe.
Raffaella is that rare piece of contemporary art that affirms goodness. The whole experience is one of goodness—good dancing, good design, good writing, good (ravishingly good) music, but also moral goodness, purity, and simple joy. The beauty of the piece arises from this goodness. It is not childish; there is evil present in the world of Raffaella, and that evil is more frightening than we witness in many other “grittier” pieces of art because it is shown as such a stark contrast with Goodness.
One of the most visually stunning scenes is the spiritual battle between the White Prince and the Dark Prince. The Dark Prince threatens Raffaella by summoning a hoard of demons, portrayed as dancers in dark leotards with ragged skirts, their legs flashing eerily between tatters of blackness. It is an undeniably creepy sequence, and the threat to Raffaella is palpable as she is surrounded by the dancers. The mere contrast between the joy and innocence we have seen her surrounded by throughout the ballet and the sordid, creeping dark things that surround her now is greatly disturbing. So when the White Prince leaps into the action with his angelic band, the conflict is both visual and moral—we feel the push and pull between heaven and hell, goodness and evil, the innocence beauty of righteousness and the dark fascination of sin, even as the dancers push and pull across the stage.
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The keys to a successful ballet libretto are similar to the keys for a successful operatic libretto: 1) clarity, 2) precision, 3) a clear moral insight.
Clarity doesn’t mean there cannot be ambiguity; there certainly can. When we first meet the Dark Prince, we cannot quite tell whether he is sinister or not. Clarity in a libretto simply means that the story must be incredibly tight. The librettist cannot wander around trying to figure out why she is telling this story. The core of the tale must be absolutely clear. This doesn’t mean the libretto must be childish or preachy; that core may be a very difficult moral or political question, and the libretto’s answer to that question may be ambiguous. But the librettist must know what she is writing about.
Precision means that there there can be no details thrown away. It cannot have any extraneous elements; every piece must contribute to the whole. Every movement, every note must have meaning and must add to the atmosphere of the piece. There isn’t actually very much dramatic time in an ballet (or an opera); the librettist cannot afford to waste even a moment. This doesn’t mean the libretto must rush itself, far from it! In ballet and opera alike, there must be little pools and eddies in which we pause and marvel. But within those pauses, every detail must add to the wonder, and between them, as the action occurs, it must occur swiftly and decisively.
A clear moral insight doesn’t mean the libretto should be moralistic. It should not. It should be beautiful and it should be whole. But a libretto is not a novel. A novelist can, in (precisely) the right setting, spend hundreds of pages fumbling around looking for moral clarity and ultimately fail to find it without compromising the heart of the novel (at least in my opinion; this is an arguable statement). What isn’t arguable is that a librettist cannot do this. Fumbling around is death to a libretto.
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Raffaella has all three of these elements, plus that most elusive of qualities: beauty. This story is simply beautiful. I watched it with my children, who are six and four, and they were able to follow along with the plot (clarity), they delighted in the little details that held great meaning (precision), and they were caught up in the battle between good and evil (a clear moral insight). The libretto achieves that wondrous fairytale balance of childlike simplicity and profound psychological and spiritual depth. My children were not confused or left cold; they were moved and delighted by the story. My husband and I were also deeply touched by elements of the story that went beyond our children’s ability to understand. But we all, adults and children alike, had a complete experience of beauty.
Raffaella is a remarkable gift. It’s available for streaming on YouTube for a limited time, so please, I beg you, gather your family and watch it. You will not regret it.
*Photo credit: the Raffaella gallery.