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Intereulturalite, intertextualite: les livrets d'opera (fin XIXe-debut XXe siecle).

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Edited by Walter Zidaric. Nantes: Universite de Nantes, 2003. [320 p. ISBN 2-86939-189-7. 20 [euro].] Music examples.

From conference to published proceedings in less than a year, timeliness uncharacteristic of our field, Walter Zidaric has edited a collection of papers first presented at an international conference on the opera libretto in the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-centuries that he convened at the Universite de Nantes in May 2002. Although the goal of making the research of the participants available quickly deserves credit, I suspect that the overall quality of the project suffered because of it.

Take the articulation of the scope and aims of the book. Zidaric provides a short two-page essay at the beginning, briefly introducing each paper (as such prefaces often do) and remarking that libretto studies are merely in their infancy, especially research that takes into account the "perspective of comparative literature" (p. 7). Moreover, he notes that "the question of intertextuality and interculturality (interculturalite) are especially relevant to the art of the libretto (la librettistique) in this period because of a host of new subject matter (thematiques nouvelles) spawned by rapid political, social, and technological change" (p. 7, all trans, mine). The meaning of "interculturality" seems clear enough: the essays span an admirably broad repertorial range engaging Spanish, Czech, Russian, German, French, and Italian opera. Several of the contributions do indeed draw parallels among works stemming from these different traditions. But intertextuality is a concept...

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