An Encoding Model for Librettos: the Opera Liber DTD

Opera librettos are a very peculiar literary genre. Often
considered an ancillary part of the opera, merely the plot
through which the music can express its power and its beauty
or the pretext for singers to show their capabilities and the
potential of their voices, the libretto is a little studied aspect of
the literature.
A considerable number of web sites are currently presenting
collections of librettos in several formats (doc, pdf, html,
gif, txt). However, they generally do not cite their source
or even which version of the text they are based upon;
furthermore, in most cases they do not respect editorial
traditions of the libretto.
Librettos have some peculiar structural characteristics: they
can be considered a subcategory of drama texts, but they
distinguish themselves form the non-musical drama texts mainly
in two ways:
• the presence of Concertato sections
• the extreme fragmentation of the versification.
The Concertato is a musical term that is passed on in the
librettos tradition to mean normally a scene or part of a scene
performed simultaneously by different characters, each singing
different texts, including several cues and stage directions. The
number of simultaneous sequences can range from a minimum
of two, to a maximum of seven/eight, as in the following
example taken from Falstaff (music by Giuseppe Verdi and
libretto by Arrigo Boito).
Pages 77-78 of the Falstaff libretto
In the libretto the versification is extremely fragmentary: as for
the drama, verses and stanzas are usually split according to the
different cues; furthermore, fin de siècle librettos admit different
metres that can change at any moment, even within a cue.
An important point is that usually the libretto that is printed
and distributed to the public can be markedly different from
the one that is sung on the stage. In the score, verses and words
are adapted to the musical progression and for that reason they
can be stretched, repeated, modified, cut and added. The libretto
is often conceived as a support for the spectator; in the libretto,
indeed, portions of text suppressed in the score, stage directions,
comments, notes that have no match with the performed opera,
can help the spectator to follow the plot. All these peculiarities
need to be seriously taken into consideration before starting
any encoding. Firstly, this is because the librettos' printing
tradition has fixed some conventions to represent the different
characteristics. Second, the public to which a digital collection
of librettos is addressed will expect its habits to be taken into
account.
In the last two years a research project named "L'Opera prima
dell'Opera" (The text/literary source before the staging of
Opera) has carried out the creation of a digital library of
librettos called Opera Liber, freely available on the Net
(currently at <http://80.19.150.245/operaliber
/> but will be soon transferred to <http://www.opera
liber.it> ). Opera Liber is a portal for the study and the
documentation of the Italian librettos for the period 1870 -
1920, including works of the main Italian composers such as
Verdi, Puccini, Leoncavallo, Mascagni, Ponchielli and many
others. The main resource of the web site is represented by the
collection of texts, available both for reading and for linguistic
querying. The texts have been encoded in XML TEI format
and are managed and queried using the native XML database
eXist. The Opera Liber DTD is a customization of the TEI
DTD P4, fully documented on the web site, and it is constituted
by a mixed base set (verse and drama) and additional tag sets
such as figure, transcriptions of primary sources, linking, and names and dates. Some customizations of the DTD have been
made, following the prescription of the Chapter 29 of the
Guidelines for Text Encoding and Interchange
(Sperberg-McQueen & Burnard).
In creating the encoding model the main problem was to find
a correct encoding for Concertatos. The Concertato can surely
be considered a sort of structural division, even if not at the
same level of usual structural divisions (such as acts and scenes,
encoded by the TEI <div> elements). A milestone approach
that was also considered would miss the consistency of the
Concertato sequences. For that reason we decided to create a
new element <sequences> that will include a number of
<sequence> elements, according to the number of columns
in the printed form.
We decided also to consider as source physical copies of
librettos, and not so called ideal copies and that because it is
often difficult to determine the belonging of a copy to a
particular edition or issue. Publishers, in fact, usually printed
a large amount of librettos, storing unsold copies, just changing
the front matters to fit the libretto they have in their repositories
to a particular mise en scène, sometimes mixing copies from
different printings. Furthermore, some of the copies we have
considered for encoding contain manuscript notes or
dedications. For all these reasons we settled on recording the
provenance of the encoded copies, creating the element
<copyStmt> (and the child elements <settlement> and
<repository>) inside the <sourceDesc> element.
Another problem was given by the encoding of the name of
characters. One of the peculiar characteristics of 'classic' drama
(from Greek tradition till the beginning of the twentieth century)
is the so called agnition, i.e. a character that is believed to be
a certain person, is recognised to be someone else, often
determining the unravelling of the plot. That means that a
character may have two names, the supposed and the real one,
but it is not two persons and that’s why the possibility of using
two nested <persName> was refused. We decided, instead,
to create a new attribute (called alias) for the <persName>
element to record supposed or virtual names, reserving the reg
attribute for real names.
The different kinds of metre have not been semantically
encoded because in many case the difficulty of understanding
the rationale invites caution. For that reason the metric divisions
have been marked only in really obvious cases, while in other
cases only the physical appearance of the verse has been
encoded by the usage of the <hi> element. In such way we
have recorded the presence of:
• particular indentations, normally, but not always,
representing a changing of metre;
• inverted commas, normally representing not sung verses;
• dashes normally representing the alternation of voices in
choral singing.
A number of minor implementations of the DTD have been
operated, fully documented in the web site.
The web site Opera Liber collects the experience of two years'
work in the field of encoding opera librettos and offers itself
as a point of reference for analogous experiences.
Bibliography
Opera Liber. <http://80.19.150.245/operalibe
r/>
Sperberg-McQueen, C.M., and L. Burnard, eds. TEI P4:
Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange. Text
Encoding Initiative Consortium, 2002. Accessed 2004-10-09.
<http://www.tei-c.org/P4X/>
Verdi, Giuseppe, and Arrigo Boito. Falstaff. New York: G.
Schirmer, 1963.