PEOPLE KNOWN FOR: libretto
German composer
Richard Wagner was a German dramatic composer and theorist whose operas and music had a revolutionary influence on the course of Western music, either by extension of his discoveries or reaction against...
Spanish author
Pedro Calderón de la Barca was a dramatist and poet who succeeded Lope de Vega as the greatest Spanish playwright of the Golden Age. Among his best-known secular dramas are El médico de su honra (1635;...
English dramatist
William Congreve was an English dramatist who shaped the English comedy of manners through his brilliant comic dialogue, his satirical portrayal of the war of the sexes, and his ironic scrutiny of the...
British poet
W. H. Auden was an English-born poet and man of letters who achieved early fame in the 1930s as a hero of the left during the Great Depression. Most of his verse dramas of this period were written in collaboration...
German dramatist
Bertolt Brecht was a German poet, playwright, and theatrical reformer whose epic theatre departed from the conventions of theatrical illusion and developed the drama as a social and ideological forum for...
American director and producer
Joshua Logan was an American stage and motion-picture director, producer, and writer. Best known as the stage director who brought to Broadway such classics as Charley’s Aunt (1940), Annie Get Your Gun...
British writer
Alexander McCall Smith is a British writer, creator of a series of novels about Precious Ramotswe, a fictional character who is Botswana’s only female detective. McCall Smith was raised in Southern Rhodesia...
American writer
Gertrude Stein was an avant-garde American writer, eccentric, and self-styled genius whose Paris home was a salon for the leading artists and writers of the period between World Wars I and II. Stein spent...
American composer and lyricist
Stephen Sondheim was an American composer and lyricist whose brilliance in matching words and music in dramatic situations broke new ground for Broadway musical theater. Precocious as a child, Sondheim...
Austrian author
Hugo von Hofmannsthal was an Austrian poet, dramatist, and essayist. He made his reputation with his lyrical poems and plays and became internationally famous for his collaboration with the German operatic...
American playwright
David Henry Hwang is an American playwright, screenwriter, and librettist whose work, by his own account, concerns the fluidity of identity. He is probably best known for his Tony Award-winning play M....
Italian poet
Pietro Metastasio was an Italian poet and the most celebrated librettist in Europe writing during the 18th century for the opera seria; his librettos were set more than 800 times. In 1708 his astonishing...
Danish poet
Johannes Ewald was one of Denmark’s greatest lyric poets and the first to use themes from early Scandinavian myths and sagas. On the death of his father, a poorhouse chaplain, Ewald was sent to school...
British playwright
W.S. Gilbert was an English playwright and humorist best known for his collaboration with Arthur Sullivan in comic operas. Gilbert began to write in an age of rhymed couplets, puns, and travesty; his early...
American author
Toni Morrison was an American writer noted for her examination of Black experience (particularly Black female experience) within the Black community and for her poetic, luminous prose. Considered one of...
Italian composer
Gian Carlo Menotti was an Italian composer, whose operas gained wider popularity than any others of their time. His realistic operas on his own librettos represent a successful combination of 20th-century...
English playwright, actor, and composer
Noël Coward was an English playwright, actor, and composer best known for his highly polished comedies of manners. Coward appeared professionally as an actor from the age of 12. Between acting engagements...
French author and scientist
Bernard Le Bovier, sieur de Fontenelle was a French scientist and man of letters, described by Voltaire as the most universal mind produced by the era of Louis XIV. Many of the characteristic ideas of...
Chinese American writer
Ha Jin is a Chinese American writer who uses plain, unadorned English prose to explore the tension between the individual and the family, the modern and the traditional, and personal feelings and duty....
American composer
Irving Berlin was an American composer and songwriter who played a leading role in the evolution of the popular song from the early ragtime and jazz eras through the golden age of musicals. His easy mastery...
Chinese author
Tian Han was a Chinese playwright and poet known for his expressive and powerful one-act plays. Tian wrote librettos for traditional Chinese opera when he was a teenager. He studied for several years in...
American actor and playwright
Harvey Fierstein is an American comedian, author, and playwright who was best known as the author of The Torch Song Trilogy, which centres on gay families. He often spoke out about gay rights issues. Fierstein...
Austrian author
Ingeborg Bachmann was an Austrian author whose sombre, surreal writings often dealt with women in failed love relationships, the nature of art and humanity, and the inadequacy of language. Bachmann grew...
Northern Irish poet
Paul Muldoon is a Northern Irish poet whose oeuvre covers both intensely personal and political terrain—from his wife’s miscarriage to the conflict in Northern Ireland. He won a Pulitzer Prize for poetry...
American screenwriter and songwriter
Alan Jay Lerner was an American librettist and lyricist who collaborated with composer Frederick Loewe on the hit Broadway musicals Brigadoon (1947), Paint Your Wagon (1951), My Fair Lady (1956), and Camelot...
Italian composer
Arrigo Boito was an Italian poet and composer acclaimed for his opera Mefistofele (1868; for which he composed both libretto and music) and his librettos after William Shakespeare for Giuseppe Verdi’s...
American playwright and journalist
George S. Kaufman was an American playwright and journalist, who became the stage director of most of his plays and musical comedies after the mid-1920s. He was the most successful craftsman of the American...
South African writer
William Plomer was a South African-born British man of letters, whose writing covered many genres: poetry, novels, short stories, memoirs, and even opera librettos. Plomer was educated in England but returned...
American dramatist
Neil Simon was an American playwright, screenwriter, television writer, and librettist who was one of the most popular playwrights in the history of American theatre. Simon was raised in New York City...
pope
Clement IX was the pope from 1667 to 1669. Rospigliosi served as papal ambassador to Spain from 1644 to 1653 and cardinal and secretary of state under Pope Alexander VII. He was elected pope on June 20,...
Argentine writer
Manuel Mujica Láinez was a popular Argentine writer whose novels and short stories are best known for their masterful and fascinating blend of myth and fantasy with historical figures and events. Mujica...
Australian writer
Randolph Stow was an Australian novelist and poet noted for his economical style and great powers of description. Stow’s first novel, A Haunted Land (1956), a wild, almost Gothic tale, appeared in the...
American composer and lyricist
Frank Loesser was an American composer, librettist, and lyricist, who achieved major success writing for Broadway musicals, culminating in the 1962 Pulitzer Prize-winning How to Succeed in Business Without...
Australian author
David Malouf is an Australian poet and novelist of Lebanese and English descent whose work reflects his ethnic background as well as his Queensland childhood and youth. Malouf received a B.A. with honours...
American lyricist, librettist and producer
Oscar Hammerstein II was an American lyricist, musical comedy author, and theatrical producer influential in the development of musical comedy and known especially for his immensely successful collaboration...
Polish poet
Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz was a Polish poet, novelist, playwright, and essayist whose reputation rests largely on his achievements in new poetic forms. Iwaszkiewicz studied law at the University of Kiev from...
French author
Ludovic Halévy was a French librettist and novelist who, in collaboration with Henri Meilhac, wrote the librettos for most of the operettas of Jacques Offenbach and who also wrote satiric comedies about...
Italian writer
Lorenzo Da Ponte was an Italian poet and librettist best known for his collaboration with Mozart. Jewish by birth, Da Ponte was baptized in 1763 and later became a priest; freethinking (expressing doubts...
Bavarian playwright
Emanuel Schikaneder was a prominent German actor, singer, playwright, and theatre manager now chiefly remembered as the librettist of Mozart’s opera Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute). Schikaneder began...
Portuguese writer
Antônio José da Silva was a Portuguese writer whose comedies, farces, and operettas briefly revitalized the Portuguese theatre in a period of dramatic decadence. Silva was born in Brazil, the son of Jews....
American lyricist
Ira Gershwin was an American lyricist who collaborated with his younger brother, George Gershwin, on more than 20 Broadway musicals and motion pictures until George’s death (1937) and who later collaborated...
Russian artist
Alexandre Benois was a Russian theatre art director, painter, and ballet librettist who with Léon Bakst and Serge Diaghilev cofounded the influential magazine Mir iskusstva (“World of Art”), from which...
German composer and author
Peter Cornelius was a German composer and author, known for his comic opera Der Barbier von Bagdad (The Barber of Bagdad). The son of an actor and an actress, he acted at Mainz and at Wiesbaden in his...
Swedish poet
Johan Henrik Kellgren was a poet considered the greatest literary figure of the Swedish Enlightenment and once called Sweden’s “national good sense.” The son of a rural clergyman, Kellgren became a lecturer...
American poet
Cynthia Macdonald was an American poet who employed a sardonic, often flippant tone and used grotesque imagery to comment on the mundane. Lee was educated at Bennington (Vermont) College (B.A., 1950);...
Danish author
Jens Baggesen was a leading Danish literary figure in the transitional period between Neoclassicism and Romanticism. In 1782 Baggesen went to Copenhagen to study theology. Three years later, at age 21,...
Jewish author
Avrom Goldfaden was a Hebrew and Yiddish poet and playwright and the originator of Yiddish theatre and opera. Goldfaden published volumes of Hebrew and Yiddish poems before his graduation from a rabbinical...
American executive and songwriter
Howard Dietz was an American motion-picture executive and songwriter. After graduating from Columbia University in 1917, Dietz joined the Philip Goodman Advertising Agency, where he was assigned to devise...
American director
George Abbott was an American theatrical director, producer, playwright, actor, and motion-picture director who staged some of the most popular Broadway productions from the 1920s to the ’60s. After graduating...
Italian poet
Ranieri Calzabigi was an Italian poet, librettist, and music theorist who exerted an important influence on Christoph Willibald Gluck’s reforms in opera. During the 1750s, Calzabigi formed an association...